StraightJACKet
by Dr. Patience's Secretary
Summary: The Men in White have finally come for Jack Spicer! Get ready for an Asylum montage of psychopathic doctors, some familiar evil geniuses,and Jack Spicer’s psychoanalysis! Will he ever escape? LOTS of crossover, and meant to be funny.
1. Chapter 1

Few doorbells are audible from their house's basement, and it's not like Jack would have answered the door anyway.

"Sir," a Jack Bot informed it's master in its flat, digital voice, "there are two men at the front door. Should we annihilate them, sir?"

Jack, hunched over his latest robotic masterpiece with a welding torch and wearing his red Frankenstein sleeveless, tried to remember if he had been expecting anyone.

"If they're solicitors, don't shoot them just yet- they might have something good. Jehovah's Witnesses: set your guns for vaporize."

"Uh, Sir," another Jack Bot began in the same monotone voice, "they don't look like salesmen or zealous religious messengers."

"They could be milkmen," another Jack Bot suggested.

"Or, the ice cream truck," said one more.

Clearly, something had been lost in translation amongst the Jack Bots, because every single one of them raised its head and went swarming upstairs.

"Stupid robots," Jack muttered angrily, lifting his goggles off his eyes. "They can't even _eat_!" He pushed away from his project and pulled on his jacket to head upstairs. "Maybe if it was a couple of DieHard battery salesmen: _then_ they could get excited!"

Before he could get to the front door, Jack had to part the sea of confused Jack Bots and send all of them back to the basement. He adjusted his collar and his goggles, stood up straight, and opened the door.

He was face to face with two tall, broad men dressed entirely in white.

"Jack Spicer?" the one on the left addressed him.

"Who wants to know?" Jack replied immediately, crossing his arms and turning one shoulder to them slightly.

"The Moore Bideath Asylum. Under the orders of your legal guardians and family psychiatrist, you have to come with us. Your personal belongings will be sent for later."

Jack stared at them. He blinked once. He still had some strudel in the toaster he wanted to eat, and a half-finished pudding cup calling his name.

"I think I left my welding-torch gas on downstairs. I'll be right back."

He tried to slam the door, but the two men stopped it and pushed right into his house.

"Ha! Entering without permission! I can have you arrested now!" Jack exclaimed, pointing at them accusingly.

"You don't own this house," one reminded him sharply.

Jack's hand bent at the wrist like a broken twig.

"Good point. Jack Bo…"

Before Jack could even order his robot minions into action, the two orderlies had grabbed him and were dragging him out the door.

"Get your germophobic hands off me you super-sterilized, anti-bacterial minions of backwards German shrinks! I've got rights, you know! I don't have to put up with this! This is beyond disrespect! I'll make you pay for this!"

Jack's voice faded from the house as he was taken from the Spicer mansion and strapped into the back of a white van.

Down in his basement, a Jack Bot turned off the gas to the welding torch, while another with an emotion chip was _extremely_ upset about a piece of burnt toaster strudel. The Heli Pak remained on the shelf behind the coat rack. The remote communications watch was still on the glass top of the world map table. Jack had no way to reach his robots, and it would probably be quite some time before he was missed. He was off to Moore Bideath

StraightJACKet

-A Tale of Total Insanity-

By Dr. Patience's Secretary

Chapter One.

"This looks like Hannibal Bean's prison in the Yin Yang world," Jack muttered under his breath when the two orderlies dragged him from the back of the van. Naturally, Jack refused to walk and kept his expression locked in one of utter disgust.

Moore Bideath Asylum actually did look remarkably like Hannibal's prison, but in reality it had just been designed by Frank Geary. It was built on a cliff that had been carefully reinforced by modern engineering to withstand all erosion from the ocean. The outer wall was a good ten feet thick, wrapping around the asylum grounds in a perfect circle that went right into the sea and rose up again on the other side.

The place was dark, cold, and gray, with glossy black security cameras around every corner and lots of open ground. Armed guards patrolled the outer wall and there was a guard at every door. Tall sentry towers rose up in eight places along the wall, where Jack could see search massive lights.

As Jack was carried by the shoulders from the van, already within the outer wall, he glanced around to scope out the facilities. He counted at least a dozen large buildings, either labs or housing, along with a handful of smaller ones with no indication as to their purpose.

"As many times as I've demanded an explanation and not gotten one," Jack said in a frustrated but calm voice, "I'm still going to ask: WHAT is going _on_? What the hell kind of crazy house is this? Shouldn't there be schizophrenics wandering around muttering to themselves and little girls talking to squirrels? Where's the green house for those people who need to water plants to keep from breaking out into an uncontrolled rage?"

As usual, he got no reply.

A pair of armed security guards opened the door with their key cards and allowed the orderlies to drag Jack inside.

Once through the doors, the atmosphere changed dramatically. The first thing Jack heard was a blood-curling scream from down the hall, and the first thing he saw was a doctor, tailed by several nurses, running down the hall with his hands coated reddened gray matter.

"Oh, that's disgusting," Jack gagged as he was totted down a hall.

The walls and floors were pure white and those foggy-glassed florescent lights lined the ceiling in long, solid strips. Immediately Jack noticed that the halls were not like those of normal hospitals, but he couldn't quite pin point the difference.

Then, before he knew it, he was swept into an office and dropped in a chair.

"Good afternoon, Jack," said the doctor sitting across the heavy desk from him.

"Who are you?" Jack demanded, gripping the arms of his chair.

The doctor grinned and picked up a green folder. He looked about fifty, with graying hair he had obviously dyed and combed over. He was over weight and, judging by his sluggish movements, he was in the process of trying neither to exercise or diet. He wore a pair of narrow reading glasses and a gold bracelet.

"I'm Dr. Schneider," he began, opening the file.

"More like Dr. Shmuck," Jack snapped quickly. "I hope you're not a psychiatrist, because the last thing anyone needs is a shrink you can't even handle his own midlife crisis!" he scoffed, pointing his nose towards the bracelet.

Dr. Schneider stared levelly at Jack for a moment and then continued.

"You're probably wondering what you're doing here and if you don't interrupt me," he said quickly, seeing that Jack was about to throw out another comment, "I can explain everything."

"Explain everything?" Jack interrupted him, raising his palms. "I shouldn't have to sit here and listen to anything! No one had any right to _take me_ from my house, and there's no reason why I should have to put up with this!"

"You're parents filed an order…"

"To hell with my parents! They don't control me…"

"We got yet another complaint that you tried to lock them in cages…"

"They said I could have the basement if I left the rest of the house alone…"

"If you're under 18 your parents are still your legal guardians…"

And on the argument went until Jack made the mistake of jumping to his feet. Dr. Schneider lost his patience at the same moment.

"_Seeing_ as you refuse to shut up for ten seconds, Jack Spicer, you can wait until tomorrow for an explanation! Maybe _then_ you'll listen!"

"Where did you get _you're_ M.D? Hell?"

The two orderlies picked Jack up by the shoulders again and carried him out the door.

"You must be the worst psychiatrist that CLOWN COLLEGE every produced!" Jack hollered as he was dragged away.

A few moments later, back in the blindingly white hall, Jack glanced up at the two men and, in a totally calm voice, said,

"There's just something about being in a funny farm that makes you want to scream manically."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two.

Jack was alone in a ten by ten foot room with a window behind a chain link grate. Everything was white. The bed that folded down from the wall, the bureau, the lamp, the door to the bathroom: white. Jack was a little uneasy here, still dressed in black and used to the shadows of his basement lair.

"Hey!" he yelled to the two orderlies as they left. "I don't do well in confined SPACES!"

But, the door and the square window set in it were both soundproof. Jack threw his hands up in aggravation and leaned his back against the door.

"This must be someone's twisted idea of a practical joke," he muttered. "This _would_ happen to me! Don't they know that people _go_ crazy in these places?"

He crossed the room to the window and, hooking his fingers into the grate, stared down at the massive courtyard below. The building he was in had no end- it was a like a twelve story doughnut.

The world outside was gray to the point of being outrageous. Every window was tinted on the outside, the clouds looked like a thick layer of out-of-focus gray matter: even the grass at the center of the courtyard looked like someone had spray-painted it all gray.

"Maybe I just went color blind," Jack exclaimed quietly, blinking a couple times.

After a few hours, during which Jack came close to dieing of boredom, the evening became dark enough for the guards to turn on the exterior lighting. Once in a while, the blinding glare of a search light would blast through Jack's window and, for a just a moment, it was day again.

Then, someone knocked on his door and opened it.

"All right, Mr. Spicer. It's time for dinner."

"I shouldn't even be here, you know!" Jack exclaimed, coming down from the headstand he was doing on his bed in a desperate attempt to entertain himself.

"Of course not," the guard said in a bored voice. "Come on, I have to show you to the common room and other places patients are allowed."

"Great," Jack muttered, rolling his eyes, as he walked past the guard and out the door. He checked the guard's nametag as he went by. "So, Garrison," he began, following the big guy down the hall, "I don't suppose _you_ have any idea why I was kidnapped from my house and brought here against my will without explanation?"

"No," Garrison replied, glancing over his shoulder at Jack. "My job is just to make sure you don't kill any of the others, none of the others kill you, and no one escapes."

"So, what, they hold Coliseum fights down in that courtyard? Is this a hospital from the criminally insane or something?"

"Something like that," Garrison chuckled.

They must have passed about forty doors, all in a gradually curving hallway, before they came to a set of double doors leading into the Common Room. The C.R., as Garrison called it, went so far back that the other end disappeared into the curve of the building. There was a long cafeteria with a shiny steel food court, a lounge with a number of televisions, and an area with a ping-pong table and other ridiculous table games that are enthralling after seventy-two hours of total solitude. One wall was made entirely of tall windows, and the other wall in the outer curve of the building had only a few, smaller windows.

"You're here until nine thirty every evening," Garrison informed him. "Your room is L036- don't forget it- and just scream if you get in trouble."

Then Garrison turned and went back through the double doors, leaving Jack in an endless room filled with about seventy mildly bored lunatics.

"Holy Hell on Earth," Jack muttered to himself. "This can't be happening."

Cautiously at first, Jack started to cross the room towards the food. No one looked up at him or gave him angry glances, for which Jack was _extremely_ grateful. He expected that at any moment a crazy old lady would come running up to him and scream hysterically in his face for ten seconds before running away to repeatedly bump into a wall. Luckily, that never happened.

Despite his low expectations in the catering, the food wasn't too bad.

"Do you have any pudding cups?" Jack asked one of the bored workers behind the counter.

"We do, but I don't think you want them," the guy admitted ruefully.

"No, I really do," Jack insisted.

Once Jack had a tray full of food and he had found a seat at an empty table, he took a moment to inspect some of the other 'patients'. He was a little confused, as he looked the room over, as he would have expected more disabled-looking types. But, there were no semi-comatose droolers in wheelchairs, there was no one pacing back and forth talking to themselves, there were no nervous twitches- nothing! And, as Jack eavesdropped on the conversations, they sounded a little too normal.

"This is weird," Jack muttered. "And the killer is: it's weird because it's so _normal_!"

Suddenly, a heavy hand slapped him on the back and knocked a spork right out of his mouth.

"Ha! I see Crazy Catchers finally caught up with infamous Jack Spicer! They use giant net or straightjacket to get you?"

Jack spun around in his chair and looked up in shock.

"Vlad!" he gasped after desperately swallowing his food. "What are _you_ doing here?"

Vlad laughed and took the seat across from Jack.

"Same as you! They travel all the way to Moscow to catch _me!_"

Just then, another familiar voice joined in.

"Oh, _no_! I can't believe they brought_ you_ here! Now I have to put with RoboFreak, too?"

"Ashley?" Jack exclaimed, his voice rising to almost a squeak. "Actually," he paused, sitting back and putting his forefingers together, "I can definitely see you getting locked up in an asylum. Did ya get Kat Scratch Fever or something? I heard that infected cat scratches can cause schizophrenia."

Ashley, better known as Katnappe, hissed at him as she walked by with her empty tray.

"They _took_ all my cats, freak," she muttered darkly.

Jack raised his eyebrows and craned his neck to look around the room.

"Dear lord, who _else_ is here?"

"Ha ha!" laughed Vlad. "Everyone!"

Jack could see no one but total strangers.

"Wait, you mean you know all these people?" Jack asked Vlad. Ashley came back and sat at the table with them. Both were dressed in very normal clothes, as were all the other patients. Ashley had on tight jeans with a black turtle neck, and Vlad was dressed just the same as ever- only, his hat was gone.

"Don't you recognize them?" Ashley butted in with a nasty tone. "What kind of villain are you?"

"Um…"

"Jack, you're such a dufus!" she went on. "Everyone here is a Villain, Heylin and everything else! Duh! Hello? Don't you _ever_ check out Seriously."

"Uh, no, I _don't_ ever 'check out' because I, unlike you, have a life and I have things to do."

"Jack never go there because evil chat rooms always making fun of him," Vlad explain in a flat tone.

Jack glared at Vlad and made like he was about to flick mashed potatoes at him with his spork.

"So…" Jack said after a suspenseful pause and instead ate the food, "_why_ are all these villains here? Some doctor got a thing for collecting bad guys?"

Ashley just shrugged.

"They told me when I got here that they would explain it all 'tomorrow', but they totally never did."

Jack's jaw dropped and one side of his nose knotted in a snarl.

"That's exactly what they told me, too! Did they just show up at your house and take you away?"

"Yeah!"

"These people are sick!" Jack snapped, slamming down his spork. "What are they doing?"

"Everyone here likes to guess," Ashley said, taking out a nail file, "but no one really knows. You'd think that a building filled with evil geniuses wouldn't stay standing for long, but…"

"As much as people here plot to escape," Vlad continued, "there is no way to carry out such plan."

Jack just frowned and poked at his food. The guy behind the counter was right: the pudding cup was awful. This only filled Jack with an even greater passion to escape.

It didn't feel like long before the analog clock on the wall read 9:30. The double doors opened and Jack could see that the walls beyond were lined with guards.

"Remember your room number?" Ashley asked Jack as they got up to leave.

"L Zero Thirty Friggin' Six," Jack murmured, casting his eyes over the room again as he left.

For the very first time, he noticed a man sitting in a chair before a window that overlooked the remainder of the facilities, not the courtyard. He didn't move a muscle as everyone filed out, so Jack slowed his pace a little. He was curious about his guy, and he couldn't help but wonder if he was dead. The man was tall, slim, and very pale, with eyes hidden in shadow and long, dark hair. In a way, he reminded Jack of Chase Young, but it definitely was _not_ him. Nonetheless, there was something about him…

"Hey!" someone suddenly grabbed his arm. "Aren't you Jack Spicer?"

Jack turned sharply to see who had taken hold of him.

"Ah! Who are you?"

"Oh _my_ God! I'm such a huge fan of you! I just love your robots!"

"Um…"

"Oh, sorry! I'm Erika Sparks! It's an honor to meet you!"

Erika was a young lady of about fifteen with long, bright orange dread locks that fell all the way down her back. She was short and skinny, and a bit on the spastic side.

"How do you know me?" Jack asked, too surprised to be flattered.

"Oh!" Erika stopped walking suddenly and pulled away from the group. "Here's my room! See you tomorrow!"

And she whipped through her door and disappeared.

"…freak," Jack stated to himself, but not in an insulting way.

"Don't believe a word she says," Ashley warned him as she pulled away towards her own door.

"Why not?" asked Jack.

"Because there's no way she could have ever heard of you. She's been here since she was, like, eight. She only knows your name because she touched your jacket and read your thoughts."

"WHAT?" Jack just about screamed, throwing his hands to the side.

"Yeah, she's totally crazy," Ashley rolled her eyes. "See ya." And she, too, vanished back into her room.

Eventually, Jack reached his door again and, with a glare at the guard, returned to his tiny room.

He took off his shoes, jacket, and goggles, and wondered how the Jack Bots were getting along without him. He used the bathroom and, once there, discovered that they had stocked his room with all the little essentials like a toothbrush and toothpaste, and even a set of pajamas. Naturally, they were white.

"People who say that black is the color of evil are so confused," he said aloud as he held up the PJ top. "Black is the color of secrecy and stealth. _White_ is evil, apparently. Whoever chose the color scheme for this place must be with the KKK!"


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

A 7:00 am, every door on Jack's wing automatically unlocked.

"This way, you people can come out and get breakfast whenever they want," the guard Garrison explained. "If there's one thing we've learned, it's never to wake a sleeping evil lunatic."

"Well…good," Jack muttered. "Except I'm NOT A LUNATIC!"

That was precisely the same message Jack had for the secretary of his new psychiatrist. He was to meet with the doctor for the first time that morning.

"Ah…yes, well, it would probably be better if you told the _doctor_," the secretary tried to explain gently. "If you could just go through there, please," she added, pointing to the door behind her counter.

Jack put his nose in the air and, adjusting his jacket lapels, shrugged off the orderly and let himself into the office.

"Good morning, Mr. Spicer," said his psychiatrist, who stood to greet him. "I'm Doctor Patience, nice to meet you, take a seat."

"You must have to do this about five hundred times a day," Jack commented as he put his feet up on the sofa in the sterile-white room.

"Actually, it's more like thirty times, but some of them come back to see me more than once a day. I only deal with the very severe cases."

"Okay, I buy that. If that's the case, _why am I here?_" Jack snapped, sitting up sharply for a moment.

Dr. Patience sighed and, sitting in a chair across from Jack, crossed her legs and rested her pen on her clipboard of papers.

"My job isn't to determine who comes in," she told him. "I only determine why they were brought there, I suppose you could say, and what it will take to get them out. With that in mind, let's begin."

Jack rolled his eyes and reclined again, putting his hands behind his head.

"So, tell me about yourself, Jack."

"Shouldn't you have all that information already?" he asked.

"Ah, well, I do, but it's only the basic statistics. I want to know how _you_ see yourself."

"Hmm. Okay."

"What are your hobbies? What are your goals?"

"Goals?" Jack laughed. "At the moment, it's to rub dirt and grime over every white surface in this damn building, which means I've got a lot of work to do," he said as he brushed his sneakers on the sofa. "And, yesterday at this time, it was to take over the world. I've been fighting with these damn Xiaolin Monks for a couple years now over these Shen Gong Wu that give your special powers, and if you can get them all then you can take over the world."

"That's interesting," Dr. Patience said, raising her eyes from her clipboard. "And, how did this start?"

"My dad sent me a puzzle box from Hong Kong and after I got it open this ancient evil spirit named Wuya told me all about the Wu. She turned out to be a total hoe, though, because she kept turning on me and replacing me with other villains."

Jack told Dr. Patience about his life and times until the session ended about an hour later.

"What happened to that other shrink?" Jack asked as he got up to leave. "That Shekki Schneider Goldberg freak?"

"Schneider?" Dr. Patience corrected him. "He had to leave unexpectedly. I'm not sure when he'll be back."

"Psssh! Good!" Jack exclaimed as he followed Patience out. "I hope he never comes back. I think _he's_ the one who had me locked up in the first place!"

"Yes, well, I'll see you in a couple days, Jack," Dr. Patience ushered him from the office and into the main hall. "Go get some lunch."

Patience closed the door behind her and locked it.

"Oh, _wow_!" she exclaimed to her secretary.

"Another fun one, Miss Seek?"

"You won't even believe it!" Dr. Patience cried out laughing, waving her clipboard. She crossed over to the counter and leaned on it with one arm. "Listen to this: He discovered _a ghost_ that was locked in a puzzle box for one thousand, five hundred years. So, clearly he has strong spatial puzzle-solving abilities, if he can unlock a puzzle box. But! This kid has spent almost four years fighting over 'mystical power objects' with a gang of ten-or-twelve-year-old monks from rural China, only apparently one's a Texan, one's Japanese, one is Brazilian, and then there's an annoying Chinese one that can't speak straight."

"Did he work at a day care or something?"

"No, actually, he spends all this time in the basement of his parent's house _building robots._ He once turned his mother's juicer into a robot. He calls them 'JackBots', and they do chores and have emotion chips. Part of the reason he builds them, he says, is because they are armed and he plans to use them," Patience slowed down to make her point, "to _take over the world_!"

Both Dr. Patience and her secretary broke out laughing, although the secretary seemed a little uncomfortable about the subject.

"But, doesn't that story," she said after her boss caught her breath, "match up with some of the others here? It sounds familiar. They _have_ mentioned him."

"Well, those subjects do know Jack, and they were probably all in on this little game together. I seriously doubt that Jack can build robots. He probably has, like, Legos."

"I don't know," the secretary shrugged passively, taking the clipboard to file the notes for Jack's next session, "sometimes people disabled in one respect are unbelievably gifted in another."

"Yes," Patience said, raising one eyebrow. "I know. I'm a psychiatrist."

Back in the Common Room, Jack sat at a round table by a tall window with Ashley and Vlad. Primarily, they were talking about the different psychiatrists they'd each met. The area was flooded in light, since the sun had amazingly come out from behind the clouds.

"You know, I realized that I sounded really insane when I was telling her about the Shen Gong Wu," Jack said thoughtfully. "But, what else was I supposed to do? Tell her I've been going to school? Working? Shen Gong Wu actually exist! My high school transcript and paychecks don't!"

"You actually told your psychiatrist about the Wu?" Ashley repeated flatly. "God, you're an idiot. Now you'll never get out of here. All you need to do now is say you can see things that aren't there and…"

She stopped in mid sentence and sat up straight, staring in shock at something across the room. Jack and Vlad saw it, too, and stared with mouths ajar.

"What about…" Vlad began slowly, "things that _are_ there but he can not see?"

"Not…sure…" she replied slowly.

A skinny, pale man was riding a bicycle around the Common Room. He wore black pants, a black hat, and a red and white striped scarf and shirt. He biked slowly to dodge others, and sometimes he would turn long figure eights around tables and chairs, or go in circles around a foosball table. Only, there was _no_ bike.

Others were gawking at this remarkable trick, too, but the man was oblivious to their stares.

"Oh!" Jack suddenly exclaimed after a few more moments of silence. "It's Le Mime! Was he here yesterday? I didn't even see him! Hey! Le Mime! Over here!" Jack waved his hand in the air and hailed to the mime.

Le Mime noticed Jack and, without ever changing his placid expression, biked over to the table casually. He put one foot down to stop and balance, and then leaned on the invisible handlebars.

"Did you just get here today?" Jack asked, knowing he needed to use 'yes' and 'no' questions.

Le Mime nodded.

"Great!" Jack said sarcastically. "I bet they're going to try to cure your silence or something. Just mime a gun and shoot them all."

Le Mime shook his head in a rueful way and shrugged.

"I don't think he can do that," Ashley said, looking Le Mime up and down quickly.

"Maybe not…" Jack said slowly. "But, a crow bar might come in _damn_ handy one of these days!"

Just then, a familiar voice joined in.

"As long as they don't try to 'cure' him of his powers," said Erika Sparks.

"Ah! Where did you come from?" Vlad shouted, noticing the wild child standing behind his chair for the first time.

"Cure him of his powers?" Jack repeated. "What do you mean?"

"That's why _I'm_ here!" Erika snapped erratically, gripping the edge of the table. She had a half-crazed look in her eye and, despite her obvious displeasure with her life at the asylum, she rarely stopped grinning. "They think my ability to hear the thoughts of any one who ever touched a certain object is a disease! Something to be fixed and obliterated! I am _not_ a fashion disaster, Ashley! You are. That's right! I can hear your thoughts just by touching this table. It doesn't work with floors and walls, for some reason, but I can even hear past thoughts. I can tell you what the people who sat here yesterday were thinking!"

"What's Le Mime thinking?" Jack asked after a pause.

Erika looked at Le Mime, who, after moment of eye contact, took off his hat and handed it to her.

"I have to touch an object for it to work," Erika explained again quickly before focusing on the hat. "He was just thinking that it's wrong to discriminate against mimes just because no one likes them."


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4.

From Jack's point of view, one must already be insane to avoid _going_ insane after living in an asylum for just a week.

"I wasn't a basket case when I got here," Jack cried out, " but I _will_ be!"

It was an odd time of day, somewhere between lunch and dinner, when no one wanted to be in the Common Room. The prisoners, as they really were, had a number of places they were aloud to hang out, including a library and expansive exercise field, so Jack was almost completely alone. He was looking out one of the windows in the outer curve of the building, hating the whole place. He was home sick and positive that his Jack Bots were falling into disrepair.

"It gets better," said a woman passing by. "At first you don't think it will, but it does."

Jack lifted his eyes and regarded her.

"Yeah? Who are you? How long have you been here?"

"Me? Oh, I've been here long enough. My name is Ophelia…" she trailed off and got distracted, staring out another window.

"Did they _not_ tell you why you're here, too?"

She nodded.

"Do they tell _anyone_?" Jack cried out, pushing away from the window harshly.

"I don't think so," Ophelia said slowly. "But…someone found out, once."

"Really? What happened?"

Ophelia was bizarre, with the occasional suspicious look or twitch of the hand near her eyes.

"He was…" she began, walking away from Jack a little. "He was a mastermind. He was unlike any other villain. They say he even rivaled the great Chase Young. But, then, they captured him- he was the very first of his kind they brought here. Unfortunately…"

"What? What, did he find something out and they had to kill him? What happened?" Jack edged her on, since she was speaking very slowly.

Ophelia looked over her shoulder at Jack sorrowfully. Then, she looked beyond him, the way a cat does when it hears a distant noise.

Something about that action spooked Jack and he turned around quickly to see what she saw.

The man he noticed from his first day was there, standing now, still staring out the window. He had an expression of the deepest thought, mixed with hate and determination.

"He's not really like this," Ophelia said sadly, her voice rising with each word. "He _is_ great. He _is_ powerful. But…he's also 'cured'."

Jack was still staring at the man while Ophelia spoke. Then, a moment later, when he turned back to ask her the man's name, she was gone.

"Ophelia?" Jack called out, looking around. He saw her shadow beyond the double doors. "See you later! Don't go near any deep water, okay?"

The Common Room was a little creepy in its empty state. Jack ran his hands over his pants and the brushing noise sounded unusually loud.

"Hey, are you listening?" he asked cautiously, taking a few steps towards the strange man by the window. "Not much of a talker, hmm?"

Jack was beside him now, peering around his front a little bit to try to see his face.

"So, you're kind of like that big Indian from 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'?"

Jack laughed at first, but then he lost the humor.

"And I'm Jack Nicholson," he said ruefully. "I shouldn't be here, either." He put his hands in his pockets and looked out the window, too. "If they lobotomize me, promise to smother me to death and bust out of here? Throw the sink through _this_ window, okay?"

There was silence for a few moments more. Jack thought about what Ophelia said, that this strange man was once 'great', whatever that really means.

"You got a name? Or should I just call you Silence?"

Something Jack said triggered a reaction. The man glanced down at Jack from the corner of his eye. And, slowly, a slim, crooked grin formed in the corner of his mouth. From experience, Jack could tell by the grin alone that there was an impressive Evil Laugh buried deep within.

"Well…" Jack said slowly. "Silence it is. Tell you what, Silence. I'll get a word in with the 'doctors' around here to make sure Chase Young gets 'cured' too. Then you guys can be Totem Poles together."

* * *

"I had a conversation with that quiet guy in the common room today," Jack told Doctor Patience after dinner that evening.

"I highly doubt that," Patience replied, wiggling the end of her pen in the air.

"Well, it _was_ more of a monologue. But, I got him to grin and look at me. I started telling 'Cuckoo's Nest' jokes, and then I gave him a name. He seemed to like it."

"Really? What did you name him?"

"I called him Silence."

Doctor Patience looked surprised. In fact, she looked a little worried.

"Silence? Where did you hear that name?"

"I didn't hear it anywhere- I just made it up. I guess you could say I called him that _because_ I didn't hear anything!"

"Wait, and he actually looked at you? As in, he made eye contact?"

"Yeah. So?" Jack shrugged, wiping his nose with the back of his hand and then wiping the back of his hand on the sofa.

"You don't know much about him, do you?"

"All I know is what that Ophelia lady told me, and that was nothing but vague. She might as well have walked up to me and gone 'Vaaaaague'!" Jack imitated in a spooky ghost voice with his hands in the air.

"Well, to begin with, Jack, that man has been here for five years and, ever since his treatment four and a half years ago, he hasn't made eye contact with another living soul. Of course, he hasn't cut his hair, either. All he ever does is stare out the windows or wander the halls."

"Treatment?" Jack interrupted.

Dr. Patience stared at him levelly for a long moment.

"As a matter of patient confidentiality, I can't talk about that."

"I'm sure Silence won't mind."

"Tell me about your mother, Jack."


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5.

"Psst. Le Mime. I need you to mime me a robot part."

"What are you doing _now_, Jack, you freak?"

"I'm making a robot, Puss in Heels! What does it look like?"

"It looks like you're gently murdering a tin can."

"You're so sick, Ashley."

The whole gang was in the library goofing around with arts and crafts materials given to them by some activity coordinator. Jack was next to Le Mime and across from Ashley, who was a seat away from Vlad. There was a kid about Jack's age sitting a few seats down, tinkering with something that looked like a Shop project.

"_You _are making a robot as well?" the boy asked in a suspicious tone, arching one eyebrow severely. "What manner of robot are you constructing?"

"Aw, I don't even know!" Jack exclaimed angrily. "I don't have any of my tools! I can't make a robot out of pipe cleaners and Popsicle sticks!"

"I bet you could make yourself a new _face_," Ashley giggled.

The other boy scratched his chin and arched his other eyebrow.

"What is your name, foul Earth Monkey?"

"Jack Spicer, Evil Boy Genius. Who are you? The son of the Wicked Witch of the West?"

"I know NOTHING of this _witch _of which you speak!" the boy shouted back with hyper-dramatic intonation. "My name…is Zim. I am a normal Earth boy just like all of you. Except the girl."

"Vhy are you green?" Vlad asked loudly, leaning behind Ashley to look at Zim.

"It's skin condition!" Zim shouted back.

"And I guess that's why you have no ears, too," Jack said sarcastically.

"…yes…"

There was an awkward silence for a moment as everyone lowered their eyes and glanced at each other, unsure of what to say.

"Anyway," Zim abruptly went on as though nothing had happened, "about these robots. I have one that I simply cannot get to work correctly."

"Oh yeah?" Jack sat up excitedly. "Where is it? Can I see?"

"Of _course_ you can." Zim put a screwdriver down and turned around in his seat. "GIR!" he screamed. "GET OUT OF THE PAPER MACHE AND GET OVER HERE!"

A small robot with a cylindrical head and body popped out of a bucket of paper mache and looked around dumbly.

"But, it's so tasty!" the little robot exclaimed in an excited, high-pitched, digital voice. "It's my _friend_!"

"Report this instant! There's someone here whom you should meet!"

For an instant, the robot's eyes turned red and it seemed to be able to focus. In one deep slurp, it drank up all the paste and leapt out of the bucket. But, by the time it finished crossing the room, it was coated head to toe in glitter and shiny paper stars.

"Ooooooh!" it screamed giddily. "Now I'm a rock star!"

Making guitar noises, Gir played an air guitar while Zim screamed furiously.

"GIR!" Zim shouted, grabbing the robot by the head and holding him up at eye level. "Concentrate! We must construct a plan of escape from this foul, freak-infested prison! But, without any way to contact the base, we're on our own."

"Welcome to my _life_!" Jack muttered, holding his head in his hands.

"_All _our lives!" Ashley exclaimed, throwing her hands up.

With a thoughtful expression, Zim set Gir down on the table and let him roll around on the table.

"Perhaps," Zim began, "there is someway, my fellow _Earth _creatures, we can work together to escape this _disgusting_ place."

"All teaming up in da' _world_ won't make difference," Vlad said pessimistically, trying to fit something round into something square, "without any tools."

"Yes, it _will _be a challenge without access to my lab," Zim agreed quietly with narrowed eyes. Suddenly, he had a thought and one eye popped wide open. So did one of his contacts (rather, popped _out_), but he didn't notice. "But we shall not be disheartened!" he shouted out, jumping up on the table and holding one finger in the air. "We need not outrageously advanced technology to escape this place! We need only…a _map!_"

As Zim spoke, Le Mime imitated his every action, and finished by unfolding an invisible road map and pretending to try to read it.

"Two questions," Jack spoke up after a moment of anti-climatic silence. "One, you must mean floor plans, right? Second, what the _duce_ is wrong with your eye?"

Zim lowered his hand and looked around his feet. Silently and calmly, he reached down, picked up the contact, and poked it back into place.

"It's part of the skin condition," he said haughtily with his nose in the air, just before stepping down from the table. Le Mime folded the invisible map up, put it away, and then returned to building an invisible craft project.

"Okay, so we need plans of this place," Jack repeated. "That won't be totally and utterly impossible!" he just about shouted sarcastically.

"Even if we did find all of the plans in one place," Ashley added, holding her head in one hand and building a colored-pasta tower, "that's a crazy amount of paper to steal. They'd notice so fast."

"This is the modern era, _Ashley_," Jack snapped back. "They aren't going to keep information like that on paper! It's a file on someone's computer somewhere!"

"Someone's computer somewhere," Ashley repeated. "Great. So, we _do_ need outrageously advanced technology."

Jack threw his hands up and sat back in his chair, frustrated.

"Well…!" he snapped back, without any idea as to what to say.

Gir ran down the table with a Popsicle stick he had fashioned to look vaguely like a rifle. He played a recording of a laser gun firing over and over, and on his way back up the table he crawled commando-style between boxes and containers.

"This is hopeless," Ashley muttered as Gir dove and crushed her pasta tower.

"I'm Girzilla!" he screamed, waving his hands in the air and playing a recording of the Godzilla screech.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6.

"How is this legal?" Jack asked his psychiatrist at the end of the first week. "I mean, this is like jail without a trail! They haven't _proven_ that any one of us has done anything wrong, and I haven't seen one scrap of paper _yet_ that says anything about some condition I supposedly have, or _why_ I'm here, or _anything_! Don't you guys make, like, film reels on each patient and narrate over them for med students years from now?"

"No, we just dub over the security tapes," Dr. Patience replied sarcastically.

"What security tapes?" Jack sat up on the couch and looked around almost frantically. "I've never seen any security cameras!"

"Anyway," he went on after a moment, "can't you tell me something?"

Dr. Patience rolled her eyes and sighed. She flipped up a few pages in her notebook and quickly wrote something down.

"Here, _Jack_," she said, ripping the page out and handing it to him.

In a matter of seconds, Dr. Patience had doodled out a picture of Jack aiming a bazooka at point blank to a tall globe of the earth.

Jack glared over the top of the paper at his doctor.

"I'll bet they're paying you good money to keep this up," he said, arching a thick eyebrow. "I _knew_ from the moment I first came in here that you were the type with money signs in your eyes. I'll bet you're a Graduate School drop-out who knows all the technical stuff but isn't certified so you couldn't get a job any other place than here! There's something fishy going on around here, and I think you know what it is!"

By this point, Jack was sitting up and about ready to jump to his feet. He had crunched the paper into a tiny wad in one fist.

Dr. Patience just shook her head and waited a moment to make sure Jack was finished.

"Or maybe," she began slowly, "I really am a fully certified doctor with a legitimate job at a mental asylum for the criminally insane. Or, I might be a leading member in a council of man scientists trying to concoct the perfect evil plan by stealing the ideas of all the world's greatest evil minds. Or maybe," she went on, really getting into her sarcasm now, "I'm an evil villain myself and I'm working under cover to break all you guys out of here!"

Jack's hands had dropped to his side and he stood blinking for a moment.

"Are you?"

"_Sit down_, Jack!" she snapped. "I'm here to help you overcome the vindictive feelings you have against the world and turn you into a productive, law-abiding citizen. It's the existence of a zombie, I know, but that's my job. Now, I'd like to talk more about this "Wuya" you mentioned. You said she mistreats you?"

Jack did sit back down, but, before he began on a rant about Wuya, he paused to ponder the psychiatrist's comment under her breath about 'the existence of a zombie'.

_Was that a slip_? Jack wondered, putting his feet up on the couch.

Jack, Erkia, Ashley, and a new inmate with paper-white hair named Pietro were lined up in front of one the huge picture windows in the common room. They had a ten minute span of time in the evening during which the sun came pouring into the room.

"So, who do you think we'll see next?" Ashley asked in a bored voice, carefully filing her nails.

"Probably someone from the Upstarts," Pietro said, putting his hands behind his head and resting his feet up on the window frame. "Shaw, I bet."

"The Upstarts?" Jack repeated. "Oh, I remember them. They rock. Is Gamemaster still the leader?"

"Oh, yeah!" Pietro laughed.

"Gamemaster? Upstarts?" Erika looked around, confused. "What are you talking about?"

"Do you think they'll catch Matsu'o Tsurayaba?" Jack went on deliberately.

"Naw, the Hand have got his back _covered._"

"The Hand?" Erika cut in. "Don't you mean the Foot?"

"No, no, no," Jack explained. "You're thinking of the Shredder, girl! He's in New York City! Matsu'o is out of Japan, and the Hand are his ninja assassins. They're a bitch, though, if you get on their bad side."

"Yeah," Pietro agreed. "They're the ones who took out Logan's true love," he said with a fake whimper, followed by an evil snicker.

"What was her name again? Mitoke or something?"

"I forget. Japanese, started with an M."

Erika jumped out of her chair and shook her fists.

"WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?"

Jack leaned away from her a little and held up his hands.

"Whoa, calm down, girl! We're just talking! Can't you just read our minds or something? We don't want to _explain _it all."

"That, or Google the names!"

Erika made a ridiculous 'angry face' and stomped her foot.

"Forget you nerds!" she shouted, clenching her fists and marching off.

There was silence for a moment, the only sound the faint 'chk-shh-shh' of Ashley's nail file.

"The problem with spending too much time in a mental institute," she said finally, "is that you start going crazy."

"THAT'S WHAT I KEEP SAYING!" Jack shouted, throwing his hands out. "Everyone knows it! But will those 'doctors' listen? No?"

"Jeez," said Pietro, "how long have you been here?"

"Seven days!" Jack cried out, grabbing his hair. "And that guy," he pointed across the room to Silence, "has been here for FIVE YEARS!"

"Damn."

"Uh-huh!"

Suddenly they heard the loud echo of an explosion, but they couldn't tell from which direction it came.

"What the hell was that?" Jack shouted, jumping to his feet and looking around.

"Maybe someone got so sick of being here that their head finally exploded," Ashley suggested, unfazed by the noise.

"Sounded like it came from the air ducts," Pietro said quickly, looking around.

"What air ducts?" Jack pointed out.

Just then, with the Common Room returning to normal, a movement caught Jack's eye. Silence had left his place in front of the window- it was the first time Jack actually saw him walk- and walked so far into the common room that he disappeared into the curve of the building. Standing against the wall, Silence signaled to Jack.

Jack cocked his head to the side and pointed to himself. Silence nodded. Pietro didn't notice anything, but Le Mime, playing Ping Pong against the wall with an invisible paddle, picked up on what was happening.

Jack crossed the room, followed by Le Mime, and approached Silence. Jack noticed, but didn't think much of, the detail that, in this one spot, the doors at either end of the common room vanished- it was a blind spot! Almost immediately, Silence went down on one knee and held out his hands in the "Ten Up" position.

"What?" Jack wondered, totally confused. Silence just met him eye to eye and nodded. There was no way to read his expression.

But Le Mime understood. Pushing Jack to the side, he put one foot in Silence's grasp and stepped forward. Silence stood quickly, lifting Le Mime up. It might seem that he would launch the poor mime through the ceiling, but there was a hidden secret.

There was a ledge with a two-foot-tall wall running all along the ceiling, which actually rose at a slight angle before flattening out. The ledge was totally invisible from the floor due to a clever optical illusion, and once Le Mime rolled over the little wall, he was invisible, too.

Jack looked at Silence in shock.

"How did you find that out?" he whispered.

Silence just held up his right hand and wiggled his fingers a little. Again, Jack saw that sinister grin.

"Oh, you've been here for five years," Jack realized what he was saying.

Something hit Jack on the head, and he looked up to see that Le Mime had thrown a mimed ball at him.

Silence went back into the Ten-Up position and nodded to Jack.

Jack took a breath and stepped forward, putting his shoe and probably his well being in Silence's hands. In one powerful rush, Jack rose up through the air and in an instant he got his leg over the little wall, then the other, and vanished.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7.

The space behind the two-foot wall on the ledge was triangle shaped, with just enough room for Jack and Le Mime to crawl on their stomachs. There was not enough room, however, for them to go side by side.

Initially, Jack landed smack on top of Le Mime, but he wasn't paying attention to that until the mime kicked him in the face and pushed him down along the narrow ledge with his foot.

Jack, shocked, craned his neck to look over his shoulder without sitting up too high. Le Mime adjusted his hat and pulled his knees up so he could swivel around and face the same direction as Jack.

His heart was racing as Jack looked down the long, gradually curving tunnel, as it essentially was. With a hand motion, Jack signaled Le Mime to follow.

Commando-style, the two scooted along the ledge, unsure of where they were in the Common Room or whether or not they were audible. A few moments later, Jack wondered what would happen if they were caught. Obviously, this vent, designed to _discourage_ such behavior, wasn't a minor secret.

After about a minute, Jack noticed a strange, glassy square on the two-foot wall. He stopped so suddenly that Le Mime bumped into his shoe. Looking back, Jack pointed to the glassy square with a quizzical expression. The mime looked down his nose at the odd thing and, after a moment of inspection, gave Jack his guess.

He mimed an old fashion crank movie camera.

"A security camera?" Jack whispered, catching on instantly. Le Mime nodded. Jack tapped his chin in thought. Then, he realized that the glass was an access panel, and that the camera was imbedded in the wall. It clearly recorded the Common Room through a camouflaged section of wall on the other side.

Pressing on, Jack reached a point there the light of the Common Room vanished and the curving ledge became a straight, square tunnel. He paused for a moment to think, and then realized that this was in the wall of the hallway of 'inmate' rooms. He abruptly felt something wrap around his ankle and, looking back, he realized that Le Mime had tied a mimed rope around Jack's foot and hooked it up to a mimed skateboard.

"Lazy mime," Jack muttered under his breath.

As Jack crawled down the cold, slightly windy vent, tugging Le Mime along with every other movement, he occasionally noticed a slit of light in the left wall. Finally, he paused at a big one and put his eye against it.

He was looking down into his very own Room L036! When he went forward a few more feet and peered through the next slit, he found someone else's room.

"Check it out!" Jack whispered, pointing to the foot-tall slit.

Le Mime arched one eyebrow and cocked his head to inspect the next closest slit. Only, he poked his. When he did, it got a little bigger. Jack sat up so quickly he smacked his head on the top of the tunnel. He tried to make his slit wider, too, but he discovered that it was only an adjustable air vent.

"Why did yours open up like that?" Jack wondered as Le Mime slid the little door all the way open. Jack turned and crawled back a little, imagining the rope off his ankle, and looked through the hole. It was wide enough that they could both see into the room.

It was totally empty, with nothing but the bed and a round table remaining. Le Mime then pointed to the door.

In place of the door was a rectangle of red bricks, the only surface Jack had seen so far that wasn't white. Clearly, it had been bricked up a long time ago.

"Why do you think they blocked this room off?" Jack wondered aloud. Le Mime glanced around and scratched his chin once before tapping the frame of the grate.

It took Jack a moment to figure out what the mime was getting at.

"Ha!" Jack muttered, almost angrily. "You know you're in an insane asylum when they'd sooner brick up a door and close off a whole damn room than go through the trouble of replacing a ventilation grate!"

Jack brought the news of the secret room back to his friends that evening at dinner. It was one of the few times they could really talk because the Common Room was so noisy that the guards couldn't hear them.

"There's a blind spot against the inner wall at the exact center of this room," Jack explained to Ashley, Zim, and Pietro. Gir was under the table rolling in food, and Vlad was absent. "Le Mime and I found out about it from Silence. So, I think that if we're careful, we should be able to hold secret meetings in that room. But, I can't be sure until I've checked to make sure the room is totally monitor free. I'm assuming it is, but I can't be sure yet."

A boy sitting in a seat at the table immediately behind Jack looked over his shoulder and said,

"Of _course _it iz monitor free! No fool would brick ooff a room and zen continue to monitor it! Except maybe _yew_!"

"Who asked you, four eyes?" Jack snapped, spinning around in his chair and facing the kid.

"Do not threaten me, with your _stewpid_, ovair-used insultz, yew albino girly boy!"

"I think I like this kid," Ashley giggled, leaning in her chair sideways. "What's your name, kid?"

"I am Dexter," the boy replied in his slightly high-pitched voice with a thick accent. "_Who_ air yew?"

"Oh my god, I love your accent!" Ashley laughed. Jack rolled his eyes in disgust and turned back around in his seat. "I'm Ashley, this loser is Jack, that's Le Mime, Pietro, Erika, Zim, and the hyper-spastic tin can covered in mashed potatoes under the table is Gir."

"Humph!" Dexter said with his nose in the air, his thick-framed glasses magnifying his eyes significantly. "I suppoz it is nice to meet ail of yew."


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8.

Though they got off to a rough start, Jack and Dexter…well, actually, they never learned to get along. Evil boy geniuses are funny that way.

Anyway, Jack wanted Zim, Pietro, and Erika to see the secret room, and, after talking with their newest acquaintance for a little while, it seemed imperative that Dexter came, too. The trick was getting all six of them- that's including Le Mime- into the room at the same time, and silently.

"Well, the guards can't see you in that one spot," Ashley summarized a few days after the initial discovery. "And I seriously doubt there's a single villain here who would have a problem with you guys doing suspicious things. Still, what about the security cameras?"

Ashley, Jack, Zim, Pietro, and Dexter were sitting around a table, picking at some lunch as they conversed. Erika was still in line trying to get a juice box, and Silence was back staring out his window, with Le Mime sitting on an invisible stool beside him.

"They are made futile by the same blind spot!" Zim exclaimed, pointing to where he knew the hidden passageway was on the wall. "_I _have been up and down that crawling space from end to end in this room, analyzed the angles of the six cameras and their span of vision and I _know _for a fact- for I am never wrong- that even those spying devices cannot spy in that one spot!"

"No," Dexter suddenly interrupted. "Zer is more zan one blind spot! Look at zeis." Dexter unfolded a napkin to its full size, took a pen from his coat, and started sketching.

"Here iz zee Common Room, yes?" he drew the long, gradually curving room. "And here are zee six periodically plazd cameras. Now, a camera doez not view in a straight line, but in a trapezoidal shape like zeis." Dexter drew two gradually separating lines to show the view of one of the cameras. "In a regulair, square room with zee straight walls, such an arrangement works. _But_, in a room with zee curving walls, zere are gaps, yew see? If zey had seven cameras, with one placed right here in zee centair, zey would catch zee blind spot. But, zey 'botched zee job', az yew say."

"Did you catch all of that?" Ashley asked Jack quickly.

"Yeah, yeah, I got it," Jack said, rolling his eyes. "I already knew it."

"No you didn't," Ashley shot back quickly, laughing a little. Jack just folded his arms and glared to the side.

"So, we got, like, what? Four blind spots?" Pietro asked quickly, inspecting the napkin sketch.

"Yez…" Dexter said slowly, "but only from zee cameras. Zose spots are still visible by zee guardz."

Just then, there came an aggravated yell from the front of the room.

"ALL I WANT IS A JUICE BOX!! IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK?? APPLE JUICE, for the love of Zeus, APPLE JUICE!!"

"That would be Hysterika being a freak again," Jack muttered, taking off his goggles to clean away some fingerprints. "Who wants to be the savior _today?_"

"I got it," Pietro said quickly. In a flash, he was suddenly at the food court with an Apple Juice box in hand and giving it to Hysterika. Instantly, she fell silent and, with a quiet smile and a giggle, she returned to the table. The whole process, from the moment he left to the moment he returned, took Pietro about three seconds, most of it attributed to waiting for Erika to take the juice.

"What's your best time," Jack asked, almost sarcastically, when Pietro took his seat again.

"Ah, I don't know," he shrugged. "I usually do about 200 miles and hour, give or take a few."

While Zim and Dexter argued in outrageous voices over something about physics, Jack sat back in his chair and looked over the Common Room. Everyone there was a villain, he knew, but obviously not everyone had powers like Le Mime or Pietro. In fact, he started to seriously wonder why they had brought Ashley here. All she had to her evil name were those rabid kittens!

_The only way to get to that room is to have Silence boost us up into the cavity. The only way to do that is if the guards and cameras don't catch us. The only way to do that…_

"THIS IS GRAPE JUICE! BLOODY GRAPE JUICE!"

Though Erika's outburst at first shattered Jack's line of thought, it also reminded him of the oldest trick in the book.

"Guys, shut up," Jack said to the other young geniuses. "All we have to do is cause a big distraction when we want to sneak up to the vents. Ashley can pull that off in a second."

"What about coming back down?" Dexter demanded.

"If you'd shut your face for two seconds, I was getting to that. We don't _need_ to get back down. That vent leads to every one of our rooms, on both sides of the hall. All we need to do is bust out the vents and we can return to our rooms at night."

"If that is the case, then _why_ can not we enter the vents from our rooms?" Zim reminded him.

"We _could,"_ Jack explained, "but only if we all agreed on a time to meet, late at night, or if we wanted to sneak into the common room after they lock our doors."

"Now we're _getting_ somewhere!" Pietro laughed. "We should send someone up right now to dismantle the grates to our rooms!"

"You're right- we should," Ashley agreed. "Someone go get Silence."

"Who's gonna dismantle all the grates?" Jack asked.

"I will," Erika butted in from a few seats away.

"YOU?" Jack, Zim, and Dexter all said at once.

"Do you even know how to work a screwdriver?" Jack murmured.

"You butt heads," Erika shot back. "No one of you knows where everyone's room is, but all I have to do is put my hand against the wall and read who was in the room last. Duh."

"_I_ will go get Silence," Ashley sighed with fabricated frustration.

A few minutes later, Ashley was sent to distract the guard at one end of the room and Le Mime the other. Silence stood waiting while Jack reminded Erika of the finer details.

"Turn it to the _left_ to take out the screws, and leave all the pieces in the room so we can replace the grates when the guards check on us. Don't come back in here, just drop into your room when you're done. Be sure to get _all _the rooms, okay?"

"Okie Dokie!" Erika said with a wink, brandishing the screwdriver. She turned around quickly and unknowingly knocked Zim on his back with her dreadlocks. "Going up!" she said in a high voice as Silence hoisted her easily up and over the hidden ledge.

"Go _left, _girl!" Jack called up in a hushed whisper. "And keep down! And keep _quiet_!"

"I'm not a moron, Jack," they heard her whisper back.

"_Shhhhh!"_

With Erika on her way, Jack decided it was time to look into something he had been wondering about for the last few days.

Casually making his way across the Common Room, side stepping dozens of fellow captives along the way, he found Le Mime dutifully imitating the guard named Garrison's every move.

"I hate _mimes_," Garrison snapped, trying to shove Le Mime away. It was useless.

"That's the worst way to get rid of them, you know," Jack told Garrison, putting his weight on one foot and folding his arms.

"Is it even _possible_ to get rid of them?" Garrison asked, trying to inch away.

"Yeah, watch this: Hey Le Mime!" Jack pretended to hold a round object. "I've got a baguette and it's all yours! Fetch!" Jack pretended to throw the pretend baguette like a football, and sent Le Mime running across the room.

"God, I owe you one, man!" Garrison laughed, leaning against the doorframe.

"Well, I am an evil genius, after all. But, don't mention it." After a pause, he continued with, "Listen, I was wondering. Remember the really loud explosion we all heard in here the other day?"

Garrison nodded knowingly.

"Do you know what that was? It sounded like the boiler room reduced to a crater."

"Naw, it was something in the kitchen," Garrison explained.

"They have a kitchen here?" Jack asked, pretended to show _only_ mild interest.

"Yeah. If you go all the way down the opposite hall you get to an elevator, but there's, like, this cool hidden door in it. So, once you walk into the elevator, you can, like, push a button that looks like the Hospital's Emblem, but it opens the second door and you just keep walking straight on into the kitchen."

"Oh. So, they cook all the food here? Impressive."

"Yeah, this place has way too much money," Garrison laughed. "I mean, you'd think that it wouldn't be possible for a Hospital to have too much money, but…"

"No, no, I see what you mean," Jack cut him off. "Uh, I gotta go. See ya!" Jack waved over his shoulder and took a few quick steps, trying not to look too excited, back towards his friend's meeting table.

"Guys, listen to _this,_" he said in low voice, leaning forward in a way that made the other boys lean in, too.

Jack repeated everything Garrison just told him, and then elaborates.

"So, you know what that means," he went on.

"That there are some Culinary School drop-outs working here?" Ashley suggested.

"_No_," Jack said slowly. "It _means_ that, one, we've got all _kinds_ of technology just a false elevator door away. Two, it also means that his place must be riddled with _more_ secret doors and tunnels. If you ask me, I think Moore Bideath Asylum was built for lunatics, _by_ lunatics."

"Not _only _technology, but chemicals, too!" Zim added, tapping the table top with his pointy, gloved fingers.

"You're _right_," Jack exclaimed, recalling a series of explosives and deadly gasses he had been grounded for more than once after concocting in his mother's kitchen.

"Umm, guys," Ashley said as she returned from distracting the other guard. "Know what I just noticed?"

"That hideous growth on the front of your face oh wait that's your nose?" Jack said so quickly that he didn't even break his tone.

Ashley rolled her eyes and pointed to him as she spoke.

"No, robofreak! What happened to Vlad? I haven't seen him for days!"


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9.

"So, what the hell happened to Vlad?" Jack asked Dr. Patience during their meeting the day after Ashley alerted him to the fact.

"Vlad?" Patience repeated. "I don't know him. "He wasn't one of mine…"

"Big chunky Russki with a missing tooth, ugly hair cut, and _alvays talked like deiss_," Jack imitated. "Hard to miss."

"You would be surprised at how many Russians we have here, Jack…Listen, I don't know him, but if you can't find him then it's probably because he was released."

"Yeah right! Vlad is the _last_ person you'd want to release for a mental institute! I think he came to China specifically _for_ the Communism! Who does that? Isn't there some way I can find out where he went? … Did he escape?"

"We're supposed to be focusing on _you_, Jack, not your friends. If you're worried about him…"

"Oh, but I'm not," Jack retorted, suddenly changing his tone and sitting up on the couch. "What _I'm_ worried about is what happens to people who are here for a while. Do you end up like Silence and Hysterika, or do you end up like Vlad, mysteriously missing?"

Jack stopped himself when Dr. Patience started and reached to her belt to check her pager.

"Ah, damn," she muttered under her breath. "I think we'll need to cut this session off early today."

"Why?"

"Dr. _Schneider_ just got back."

Jack sensed more than a small amount of distain in the way his psychiatrist pronounced the name.

"I take it you don't like him very much?" he asked as he got to his feet.

"Well, you know. Who doesn't hate their boss?"

"I wouldn't know. I've never had a job." Then, Jack added, "Why don't you just smack him over the head with that walking stick you keep by the door?"

"The sheleighly? Trust me, I'd love to. Actually," she added thoughtfully, seeing Jack to the door, "what I'd _really_ like to do is give him a transorbital lobotomy with a pair of used chopsticks."

"I don't even know what that is and I'm _still_ sickened," Jack said loudly, looking over his shoulder as he walked through the door.

"Google Image it sometime. You'll puke."

Since he wasn't looking, Jack bumped right into Dr. Schneider. He was actually _shorter_ than Jack, though Jack had never seen it before because the only time they met the man was sitting down.

"Oh, hey, pardon me, Midlife Crisis Man! Hope I didn't disturb that carefully positioned drain snake that's supposed to be your hair!"

Schneider glared at Jack and twisted the corner of his mouth.

"Enjoying therapy, Mr. Spicer?" he asked calmly.

"Oh, yeah, I just love ranting about magical objects and other dimensions to people who can't conceive the concept of a lie! By the way," Jack added as he passed the Doctor and went towards the door. "I've got a message from myself and all my evil genius friends: Don't even bother trying to do what you think of as 'fix' our so-called problems, because people like me, and Zim, and probably even Silence can never be changed!" With that, Jack gave him the Loser "L" and left.

Dr. Patience came out of her office and, as she locked it, both she and Jack heard Schneider mutter something like, 'That's what you think…'.

Later on, since Jack usually had to meet with Dr. Patience in the morning, Jack and some of the others were back in the library, working on their 'arts and crafts' projects.

Dexter had made a somewhat obvious discovery that, once Le Mime created an object, it could be made visible with paint. But, once made visible, it could no longer be altered.

"So, if Le Mime can made anything at all, why don't we just have him mime a bunch of guns so we can bust out of here?" Ashley asked with her head in her hand, leaning on the white surface of the long table.

"I'll make this very simple for you, Ashley," Jack said sarcastically, "since I know you have trouble with deep concepts. Boxes, bats, and skateboards are simple objects and everyone knows how they're made. Hang guns and computer chips are a _little _bit more complex, and not something of which Le Mime knows the inner workings."

"Okay, I get it," she tried to shut him up.

"And even if he did understand the complexities of, say, a computer chip, that would be damn hard to mime with his round, stubby fingers, and then…"

"Shut up, I get it already!"

"…even _harder_ for us to use, since those things stop working after you dunk them in paint!"

Ashley cut Jack off just as he finished by whipping a fistful of Q-tips at him.

"Hey, watch where you're flinging those things!"

Also at the table were Zim, Gir, Pietro, Dexter, Erika, and Le Mime. Zim and Dexter were arguing over how to make Gir obey, Pietro was trying his luck by stacking up toothpicks faster than they could fall down, and Erika was holding a monologue with Le Mime.

"I don't think I could handle never speaking, you know, the way you and Silence are. I think I would just explode. All the words would back up inside of me like carbonation and eventually my head would just pop out and the world's longest sentence would come spilling out. You know, as long as I've been here, I've never heard Silence even sneeze. And, I've been here since I was little. I was here before him! He had friends, too, three or four, but maybe they were just visiting or something. His hair used to be really short, but I don't think he's cut it once in all the years he's been here."

Suddenly Erika stopped and looked around.

"Guys!" she exclaimed. "Know what I just realized?"

They all looked up to listen.

"Even if Le Mime did say something, we wouldn't know what he was saying because it would be in French! So, it doesn't matter if he never speaks because we wouldn't understand him anyway!"

There was total silence at the table. Slowly, Jack clapped his hands together once, then again, and then a third time after a considerable pause.

"Oh, you're so right. It's not like Dexter has that accent for no reason!"

"_Anyway_," Ashley hissed under her breath, putting her hand to the side of her eyes to set herself apart from Erika.

"Ugh! You jerks! Nice!"

Le Mime reached out and patted her on the head, but then went back to miming a skateboard.

Erika pushed up from the table and tromped away.

"It's not like I took down the grates in _all_ your rooms in that dusty old vent, after all! I'll just go talk to Silence!"

"Talk _at_ Silence," Jack muttered with a laugh, making the others snicker.

Once Erika was out of the room, Jack, Dexter, and Zim leaned forward to talk.

"With zee talkative one out of zee way, when shall we meet?"

"Tonight, during dinner," Jack asserted. "That place gets so busy they won't notice a thing. And, with so many people going back to their rooms all at once later on, they'll never notice that we're not with them. We just have to be back in our rooms before the guards leave the Common Room, since they're always the last ones out."

"Yes, and once we are convened, I have something to show you, but I _dare not_ reveal it here!" Zim said in his ever-dramatic tone.

"It better not be another robot like Gir," Jack said quickly, "because if it was I think I _might_ just drop dead."

After Erika left the library, she pretended to skate down the halls on the slippery, waxed floors. Wearing only socks, she actually moved along fairly quickly. Occasionally she would stop and touch a doorknob to read the thoughts of the last person who opened the door. When she reached the Common Room double doors, she realized by the handles that Silence wasn't in there. So, she backtracked to his room, R3ZT.

"Knock knock!" she sang, rapping on his door with her knuckles. "I know you're in there! Can I come in?"

After a few seconds, she heard him undo a lock and the door opened half way. Silence looked at her with his vacant, foggy-eyed expression, squinting a little.

"Hey, you have a lock on your door? How did that happen? Do you put that there? Are you worried someone might try to break in? Got anything good in there? Can I come in?"

Silence stared for a moment, but ultimately consented to let her in.

"Wow, you're room is different!" Erika exclaimed. "You don't even have a fence over your window? I wish I knew what the deal was with you…" she rambled on for a few moments, skipping around the room quickly while Silence slowly made his way to the window.

"This window could really come in handy, you know, with Jack's escape plan." Erika slowed down long enough to go and stand next to Silence, gazing out the window on to the front entrance to the asylum and some of the other buildings. "I think that, if there's anyone who can get us out of here, it's Jack Spicer."

Silence looked down at her, one eyebrow arched a bit.

"If you don't believe me, then why did you lead Jack to the hidden passage?"

He looked around suddenly, picked up a pen off his nightstand, and handed it to Erika.

"Oh, you want to write…." Erika paused and felt the pen for a moment. "Oh…" she read his thoughts, "Jack isn't the first person you've revealed the passage to?"

Silence shook his head. He took the pen back, held it for a moment, and then handed it back.

"You…don't think Jack has the foresight to deal with the security here? Well, I think you're wrong! Between me, Jack, Le Mime Pietro, Zim, and Dexter, we can bust out of here no problem! In fact, it sounds like…" Erika cut herself off abruptly and slowed her speech. "…like you've just given up hope."

She looked up at him- he was a good foot and a half taller than her- with a sad expression.

"Have you given up? Is that why you let your hair grow and why you always move so slow? But…you can't have really given up if you've shown other people to the secret room…I mean, you have to believe in Jack and the others! They're gonna level this place!"

With that, Erika gave Silence a big hug around his middle, something he didn't know how to react to, and went running out of his room. She still had the pen clutched in her hand, trying to wring a few more thoughts out of it.

_I can't wait for dinner tonight_, she thought. _They'll figure out a way to break us out!_


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10.

That evening, while a spaghetti dinner was served up with garlic bread on the side, the mismatched team of villains stepped one after another into Silence's grasp to be boosted into the hidden crawl space. Jack Spicer, Invader Zim, Dexter, Pietro Maximoff, Le Mime, and Hysterika left Katnappe in the Common Room to keep guard and cover for them in case a guard noticed something amiss.

"I'm going last because I don't want any of you coodie-covered boys looking up my skirt!" Erika protested as they funneled along the wall.

"That's not possible, girl," Pietro muttered as he was forced by her.

"Yeah, you're wearing pants underneath!" Jack finished as he went by.

The six of them made their way through the hidden passage at a steady pace, and soon reached the dark vent. From there, they quickly found the hidden room, lit by the blaring exterior lighting coming through the window. The boys, all skinny as rails, had no issues getting through the grate, but Erika…She made the mistake of going through head first and halfway there discovered that her hips inhibited any further progress.

"Son of a bitch!" she snapped, pushing on the inner wall of the room, several feet above the floor, but with little success.

"I guess your derier iz simply too grande!" Dexter snickered as he and the five other boys stood staring.

"She looks like one of those taxidermy animals you mount on the wall with a plaque," Pietro pointed out, quickly running his hands through his hair and crossing his arms.

"Oh, shut up, Speed!" Erika snapped. "That's what I'm calling you from now on: Speed! No, even better, Meth for Crystal Meth! You're Meth Boy!"

Suddenly, a new voice joined in.

"Is this really all he sent me to work with?" asked a high, arrogantly British accent.

They all turned or looked up to see an extremely young boy sitting at the table. They couldn't believe they hadn't noticed him when they first dropped in. He was wearing a yellow shirt with red overalls.

"What the?" Jack exclaimed, jumping back. The others reacted in a similar, shocked manner.

"_Who _are _you?_" Zim demanded, his voice rising sharply and straining.

The boy paused- he had amazingly adult mannerisms- and tapped his finger tips together. He was actually sitting on a couple of big books to be level with the table.

"You may call me…Stewie," he said almost cautiously.

"How did you get in here, kid?" Jack asked slowly.

"How the duce do you think I got in here? The same way as the rest of you!" Stewie snapped back offensively. "Although," he added with a faint, haughty chuckle, "I didn't have to crawl."

"I sink zat what zee Spice Boy _meant_ tew ask," Dexter cut in, "iz _what_ aire yew doing here?"

Stewie jumped up on the table immediately and let a long floor plan unroll across the table and little over the edge.

"We are _all _here, gentlemen," Stewie began in an authoritative voice, "oh, and, Hysterika," he added with a short guffaw at the girl who had become a wall ornament, "for the same purpose: to escape this _egregious_ prison known as the Moore Bideath Asylum! This is the layout of every building within the facility," he went on, taking out a laser pointer to indicate points on the plans. The others all gathered around the table in curiosity, and Erika had a bird's eye view. "I have been working on a few small operations for about a month now, but it will take all of us to pull this off, men!"

"I can see why we aire all here," Dexter commented, "we geniuses or with special powerz…but what is Jack dooing here?"

"Oh, well that's very simple," Stewie began to explain in his intense, deathly sarcastic tone. "Can any one of you say that the people you know on the Outside aren't bumbling idiots or your mortal enemy?"

It was true. Zim, Dexter, Pietro, Le Mime, and even Stewie came from worlds where their neighbors were their enemies, their family consisted of fools, or their roommates were blatantly moronic.

"So, Jack has…"

"I've got JackBots!" Jack exclaimed suddenly. "If I can find a way to contact them, then they could help us escape!"

"Precisely!" said Stewie, turning on his heel in a militaristic style. "I have specialized jobs for each and every one of you, even Gir."

"_Now_ you really have my attention," Jack laughed, snapping his fingers and pointing to Stewie.

"Zim!" Stewie turned to the Irken sharply. "I believe you have something to share?"

"Indeed I do," Zim replied, pulling a little gizmo from him pocket. "This is a recording taken by Gir a fw days ago. He was thrown in the trash and ended up taking the elevator all the way to the basement."

Zim set the device down and pushed a button. The little thing began to spin around like a top until it was just a blur. Then, it projected a bluish holographic video in the air. At the speed the image was spinning, it looked like a straight-on view no matter where you stood. The video of Gir's expedition began at the moment he jumped out of the trash can in the elevator and into the white tile halls of the basement. Through the little robot's vision, they saw that the basement shared the curved shape of the rest of the building, but there were only two doors- one for the elevator and one that seemed to lead into a room directly beneath the courtyard. Gir sat down on the ground and watched the blinking buttons on the code-entry panel.

"Uh, this part goes on for a little while," Zim muttered, pushing a button on the device to fast-forward through about ten minutes of uneventful blinking. When he let it play again, Gir watched as a security guard came down the hall and, without noticing the little robot, punched in a security code to open the door.

Immediately Gir leapt up and went running through the door, where he was met with a remarkable scene.

The courtyard had split down the center and opened up like doors of a hanger. Trucks on the surface were backed up to the edge of ramps leading onto the basement, and dozens of men where moving materials into the giant cavity under the courtyard.

"Wait, what is this?" Jack exclaimed, pointing at the recording. "That looks like one of my JackBots!"

"It is," Stewie replied grimly.

As they watched the video a few moments longer, realization gradually set in.

"They cleaned out your labs," Stewie told Dexter and Jack in a foreboding tone. "They couldn't get much from Zim's lab because it's so deep underground, but yours were just in your basements."

"This is impossible, though!" Jack cried out. "The sun was clearly still up when this all happened! There's no way we could have missed it all."

"Listen," Zim said darkly, raising a forefinger.

After a moment, there came a loud bang as a steel box slipped off the ramp and plummeted to the concrete floor.

"Sound familiar?" Stewie asked the group.

There was silence for a moment as everyone thought.

Suddenly, Le Mime waved his hands in the air excitedly. He made a series of pantomimes, but it was tough to tell what he was getting at. He seemed to be stirring a pot, then lighting a match…

"Oh, oh, I got it!" Erika exclaimed. "It was the- the- that huge explosion we all heard the other day! Remember? It came through the vents!"

"The guard said that came from the kitchen," Jack recalled.

"Of _courzz _'e said zat!" Dexter snapped. "'e was not about to tell yew about how our laboratories have been cleaned out!"

"But, there was nothing in the courtyard when that happened," Pietro added. "We would have seen all this."

"Is there ever _anything_ in the courtyard?" Stewie asked. "Have you ever seen a single bird or leaf? Have you ever seen movement in the other windows?"

"Well, no, they're darkened…" Pietro began.

"How convenient! They could build a super laser in that courtyard, blow up Mars, and we would never know about it!"

"This doesn't make sense," Jack interrupted. "If those are just, like, TV screens on the other side of the windows, we would be able to tell. It would work if we looked straight on, but from an angle we would be able to see the depth flattening."

"You _are correct_," Zim exclaimed. "But they aren't just using weakling HD TV, now are they? You see this?" he snatched up the device on which he had played Gir's recording. "It only _seemed_ to be playing in your direction, when _in fact_ it would have appeared that way no matter _where_ you stood!"

"Theatre in the round," Erika murmured approvingly.

"So, yew sink zey aire using somesing like ziss?" Dexter asked, eyeing the device.

"Perhaps," Zim replied, tucking the thing away in a flash. "But, it would have to be ENORMOUS!"

"Yes, well, we'll get to that. In the meantime, do you all realize what this means?"

"I don't!" Erika said, throwing her hand in the air. "I mean, I think I know what it means, but I just want to make sure we're all on the same page."

Stewie rolled his eyes and tried to get the laser pointer in Erika's eyes.

"It means," he said, "that all the technology we ever designed and all the tools we need are _right here_, practically under our feet. They have made a fatal error and the time for our attack has come!"

"You did _not_ just say that last part," Jack gasped incredulously. Stewie completely ignored him.

"If Pietro can get Hysterika into the basement, then she can read the mind of whoever last entered an access code in that panel- a code we can use to sneak into the holding area and take back what is ours!"

"Oh, that's just great," Jack said calmly. "But, I think the first order of business is to stuff thunder thighs back through that vent before we run out of air in here."

"YOU ARE GONNA DIE, JACK SPICER!" Hysterika screamed, flailing her arms and dreadlocks viciously. "I'M…"

"SHHHHHH!" the whole group silenced her at once.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11.

The morning after Jack and the others met in the hidden room, another secret was revealed.

Jack, Le Mime, and Ashley were leaning against the tall picture windows in the common room, pretending to stare into the courtyard. In reality, they were trying to detect a projected image or pixels. So far, they hadn't had any luck. It simply looked like a real, live courtyard.

"Any luck?" Ashley asked in a low, bored voice. Jack and Le Mime just shook their heads.

"Hey you guys turn around for a second I got something to show you!" Erika shouted out, running up to them and practically slamming into the windows.

"What the?" Jack jumped back in surprise. "What? What is it?"

Erika grabbed Jack's wrist to drag him from the window, and Le Mime imitated her by taking Ashley's wrist and following after Erika.

"Not so fast, girl!" Jack shouted, tripping along with his head craned back to avoid Erika's almost-dangerous dreadlocks.

"Stay right here!" Erika instructed him, whipping him into a chair and running off again.

Jack adjusted his goggles on his head and watched Erika run back across the room to where Silence stood, staring out a different window. She grabbed him by the wrist and dragged him all the way over to the table where she had left Jack.

"Let me guess," Ashley began, "intervention?"

"No," Erika snapped back, "just watch and _listen_ to this!" Plunging her hands into her pockets, she pulled out three or four tiny silver bells bunched together on a string, and a dull knife from the food court. She dashed away for a moment, leaving Silence to roll his eyes and cross his arms, and returned with a metal bowl.

"Okay!" she gasped. "Watch this." She picked up the bells and gave them a good shake. They had a crisp, delicate chime to them. "Here that?"

After Jack and Ashley exchanged sarcastic glances and then nodded, Erika handed the bells to Silence. That is, she shoved them into his hand.

"If you don't mind, Silence."

Gazing into the distance opposite his hand with the bells, Silence patiently shook the bells.

"What the hell?" Jack cocked his head to the side.

"I didn't hear anything," Ashley practically complained.

"Oh, it gets better," Erika exclaimed, taking the bells back and picking up the metal bowl. With the handle of the knife, she whacked the rim of the bowl, causing it to resonate an awkward note. After it rang for a couple seconds, she placed the bowl in Silence's still extended hand. Instantly, the tone vanished. Erika waited a few more seconds, and then took the bowl back. As soon as it left Silence's touch, the final, quite seconds of the tone were audible.

This time, Jack and Ashley just stared.

Le Mime applauded.

"Can you even believe this?" Erika exclaimed in a strained whisper. "Not only does he not speak, but he can't speak. He can produce no sound, not even through another object! He can sneeze, but you'll never hear it! AND, just listen to this! Silence, if you would?"

Erika started to sing the Oscar Meyer Wiener song.

"My bologna has a first name, it's O.S.C.A…"

Just before she said "R" Silence reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. Erika seemed to still be speaking, screaming even, but there was no sound. Then, at the last moment, he took his hand away.

"…Y.E.R!" Erika screamed, like someone had turned off the Mute to discover the volume had been left way up.

"That's friggin' messed up," Ashley said, straining her head away from Silence.

"Wait a second!" Jack interrupted her, sitting up in his seat sharply. "Know what I just figured out? Remember how I was trying to figure out _why _they brought here the people they brought here? They must be trying to take away the things that make us dangerous! Think about it. They took all my robots, and all Katnappe's cats. They _probably_ took Silence's…he probably had some power to produce some kind of sound or…something to do with sound- but, when they took it from him, they took all his…"

Jack glanced up and saw that Silence had his arms folded again and he was slowly shaking his head at Jack.

"Uh…that's not the case with you, huh?" Jack laughed nervously. "Well, that's a pretty good trick. Good for sneaking around, I suppose."

Silence seemed to sigh as he turned around and walked away.

"Not so good for getting people's attention," Ashley pointed out. "Now, in the mean time, what about those windows."

"Oh, right…"

Jack had to duck sharply as a television remote soared across the room and nearly conked him between the eyes. He spun around and grabbed the remote up from the table.

"Who did that?" he shouted, brandishing the clicker over his head.

Silence caught his eye and pointed to a blank TV up on the wall.

"What?"

"Give me that," Ashley snapped, taking the remote. "Here!" she pushed the power button and turned the TV on.

"Oh, give me a break. Silence could have done tha…"

Jack stopped. He thought. He was on an evil boy genius winning-streak today.

"Oh my god," he muttered. "Of course. Silence must have known all along. I mean, he's been here long enough to know…"

"Know _what_, Jack?" Ashley and Erika snapped or demanded at the same time.

Jack motioned for the two of them and Le Mime to lean in so he could speak quietly.

"We can't tell if that's the real view or not because it's the real view _right now_! They must be able to turn the image of the courtyard on and off just like a TV whenever they open those huge doors. That's why we've never noticed anything before!"

With the window mystery solved and Silence's remarkable powers uncovered, escape plans moved quickly for Jack, Zim, Dexter, and Stewie. But, things moved even faster for Pietro and Erika.

"Aw, I hate these elevators! They're so damn slow!"

"Are you kidding? We're about to achieve zero gravity in this thing!"

That evening, with Pietro's lighting-fast footwork, he and Erika managed to sneak onto the elevator at the end of the hall of inmate quarters. The only danger was in an asylum orderly calling the lift and discovering Pietro. Erika had lived at the asylum for several years now, so she wasn't too unusual a sight on the elevator.

"If that door opens before we reach the basement, I am _so_ out of here!" Pietro said quickly, eyeing the blinking numbers over the door and tapping his fingers on his pant pocket nervously.

"You could climb up and out through the ceiling panels," Erika suggested, glancing up at the ceiling.

"I'll keep that in mind," he replied, glancing at her sideways.

Then, the elevator reached the bottom floor. The two clung to the side walls near the door as it opened, just in case someone else came in. But, luckily, there was no one.

Pietro and Erika ran from the elevator. Erika stuck to the wall and Pietro took off. In just a few seconds, he ran the entire length of the hall, which was technically the massive circumference of the building.

"It's just like Jack said," he told Erika when he reappeared on her other side. "There's only one other door and a key panel for the entrance code."

"I just thought of something," Erika said quickly.

"What?"

"We should have brought a couple of flash lights or something. It's gonna be a black hole in there."

"We'll worry about that once we're in."

Conversations between Pietro and Erika were amazing high paced, often without half a breath between sentences.

Erika sprinted down the hall at a _human_ pace, while Pietro darted back and fourth between the elevator and the locked door, partially out of caution and partially out of impatience.

When Erika finally reached the other door, she was panting.

"Jeeze Louise!" she exclaimed. "I haven't run that far in a _long_ time!"

"You used to do a lot of running?"

"Escape attempts over open ground. It's a _long_ way to that outer wall!"

Reaching out, Erika laid her hand over the nine blinking blue buttons and concentrated for a moment. Sure enough, there were the thoughts of the last person to enter the code.

"028 83 7395!" she said triumphantly as she entered the code.

The buttons lit up red when she finished the code, buzzed once, and then went back to blue.

"What happened?" she wondered aloud.

"I don't know, but that number you just said sounded an awful lot like someone's social security number!" He paused, and then added, "better take down his name, too! That could come in handy."

"Oh, shut up and let me try this again!" Erika snapped.

Taking her time and clearing her mind of the previous attempt, Erika waited for the code to become clear. Then, after a few more moments, she picked up on a pattern. There was a stronger, underlying current of thoughts, all from different people but all of the same idea.

"Ah!" she exclaimed. "_Now_ I have it! 588 2300 367473. Wow, that's an awfully long code! How do all those guards remember it?" Erika wondered as the buttons lit up green and the door slid open.

"I know how," Pietro boasted.

"Yeah? How?"

"588-2300-EMPIRE!" he sang.

Erika rolled her eyes and shoved Pietro through the door with a laugh. Though, neither of them knew there was a short flight of stairs.

"…Oops…" Erika muttered after hearing Pietro roll and bounce down the stairs. "Sorry, Pietro…"

There was a short silence as Pietro picked himself up and brushed his hands over his clothes.

"_Ooowww! _…Let's just…find some lights."


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12

"Doc! Listen! You _have got_ to tell me what happened to Vlad!?" Jack insisted, sitting on the edge of the couch in Dr. Patience 's office. "I don't care if you fried his brains or used him for animal testing or deported him or _what_! I HAVE to know! You can't leave me hangin'…"

Jack was interrupted when who but Dr. Schneider burst through the door.

"Patience! Where's that damned report I asked for?"

Ms. Patience slowly and calmly looked up to address him.

"Sir," she said, "you only asked for it yesterday. I'll need more time to…"

"I don't care how much time you need! Time is money, and we're already cutting corners…"

"Sir, I'm with a patient right now."

"It's just Jack Spicer! He's hardly worth anyone's time anyway,"

By now, Patience was on her feet and walking to the door to force him out.

"If you'll excuse us, Sir," she said, doing her best not to glare and hiss, and closed the door.

She turned her back on the door and leaned against it heavily, waiting a moment before turning the lock and muttering angrily.

"Cutting corners my ass! I _hate_ that man," she snarled. Jack was a little taken aback by this sudden change in his normally tranquil doctor. In fact, her whole personality seemed to invert before him. "Jack!" she snapped.

"Oh, god, what?"

"Come 'ere a minute. I gotta show you somethin'."

Jack jumped to his feet and trotted over. As he neared, Patience took a screwdriver from the breast pocket of her jacket.

"Pay attention. I'm gonna show you something useful. See this light switch? Well, I'll have you know that turning the lights off in any room in the building turns off the video cameras."

"What? No way!" Jack exclaimed, wondering what on earth Patience was doing.

"Yeah! The logic behind that is that no one can do anything in the dark worth recording, and if they turn on a flashlight then the camera starts recording again."

'Why not just get night vision?"

"Because that would mean recording 24-7, and that jerk is such a cheap…Anyway, here's that useful something."

Holding up the screwdriver, Patience leaned down and unscrewed the white panel around the light switch. Pulling it off the wall, she revealed a series of wires in the wall.

"All you have to do is unplug this little yellow one here," she said, yanking a thin yellow wire out of a plug. "Hear that? That's the sound of the cameras in this room shutting down."

"But, didn't they just get all that on tape?"

"They sure did, but there are thousands of recording cameras in this place, and they would only watch my tape if I reported something."

Jack held his hands up and tried to slow the situation down.

"Wait a second," he said, "why are you showing me this? What are you doing?"

She handed him the screwdriver, pausing until he took it, and walked over to her large, cluttered desk.

"Jack," she said, taking a seat behind the desk and beginning to rummage through some papers, "I know you've already figured out that Moore Bideath Asylum is actually a prison. It's pretty obvious. And, you can be sure that no one working here was hired under the impression that they would be aiming to cure mental illnesses. No, Jack, all we do here is annihilate the competition. That's right. I started working here because I figured it would give me a foot up on the food chain of crime, right? Wrong! Schneider, better known as _Stanley Markos_, thinks he's a big league hitter in the world of villains, but he's more like…" she paused and muttered under her breath, as though her rant had reached a weak point, "a troublesome nerd. Not even troublesome- just flat out annoying!"

"So…" Jack began, not really caring about Patience's frustration, "you're going to help me escape?"

She looked up from her desk and gave him a sideways smile.

"Spicer," she said, "I've already helped you escape. I sent you Silence."

"Silence?" Jack repeated. He thought for a moment, and then added. "Yeah, what's the deal with him anyway?"

"You'll see."

"OKAY, and what about Vlad?" Jack demanded, pushing on.

"Oh yeah…He checked himself out."

"What."

"That's right. Believe it or not, all you have to do to get out of here is pass a test. But, no one with a criminal mind will ever be able to pass…I think it's called a Docility Test or something."

After Jack left Patience's office that morning- he never did find out what she was searching for- he took some time to think about all she had told him. He told Ashley, Le Mime, and Erika about it during lunch, and then told the other boys in the evening when they met up in the secret room.

"But, I don't know if I can trust her. It sounds like she's setting me up. I mean, how do I _know_ that the yellow wire doesn't just unplug the audio and not the video? How do I _know _Vlad was released and not lobotomized? What if _Silence _is even against us? He could sure as hell pass a 'Docility' Test, so why send Vlad away and not Silence?"

Zim and Stewie stared at Jack with almost annoyed expressions. Dexter was off with Pietro to steal robot parts from the basement.

"Did you know that you're borderline albino?" Stewie suddenly asked.

Jack lowered his eyes with a non-serious glare and went back to working on a piece of electronics with which he hoped he would be able to summon any and all of his Jack Bots. Clearly, the others either didn't believe him or weren't taking him seriously.

In the distance, they heard a hollow, echoing _thud thud thud thud_. It was coming from the vents, but no one paid any attention because they all knew who it was.

"I found a marshmallow!" Gir giggled happily, brandishing a big white marshmallow with a bite taken out of it. "Somebody tried to eat it but I _saved_ it!" he laughed, sitting on the edge of the vent with his legs dangling over. "What's that, marshmallow?" he just about screamed, holding the thing up to an ear that was not. "You say you don't WANT to get eaten? Don't worry, I'll protect you! Quick! Hide in here!"

Without even chewing, Gir shoved the marshmallow in his mouth and swallowed it whole. There was silence as they all waited for some sort of conclusive, idiotic comment.

"Oh no…" Gir muttered, his eyes turning sad. "I _ATE _him!" Gir jumped to his feet and, looking down the vent, pushed a button on his head to play a recording.

"Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!" it went.

Jack looked up sharply and arched one eyebrow as high as it would go.

"What the hell? That sounded like…"

Zim finished for him.

"Darth Vader screaming "NO" at the end of Episode III. Yes, I am aware, be silent."

"I'm one of the beakers that 'splodes in that scene!" Gir laughed and screamed at the same time! "Chk-chk-chk-chk-chchchchchcBOOM!"

"That's it," Jack muttered angrily. "I'm going to find and tell Silence about what Patience told me today."


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13

"If this doesn't work, everyone get ready to run like hell," Jack warned the group huddled behind him. He had one hand holding up the panel over a light switch and the other hand holding a screwdriver. They were in the hallway outside the secret room, and in 72 hours 13 minutes and 30 seconds, they would enact their escape plan.

Jack turned the screwdriver as Patience had showed him. A faint, distant humming, coming from the ceiling, suddenly ceased.

There was a pause as Jack, Le Mime, Pietro, and Zim looked around and waited for an alarm to sound.

"Did it work?" Pietro asked quietly.

"Don't jinx it," Jack replied, straightening up and reattaching the switch panel. Within a few moments, the four of them were on their way, trying to look as calm as possible.

"The hallway security system down?" Ashley asked quickly as Jack and the others casually entered the Common Room.

"Down and out. We could record audition tapes for STOMP with those vents and they wouldn't notice! Pietro," he turned sharply as the older boy passed. "Find Erika and run down to the basement. See if you can find my Helipack."

"Sure thing." In a flash, Pietro was gone and looking for Erika.

"Okay," Jack went to the windows to inspect the courtyard down below. "If we can get…"

Suddenly, Pietro was back, bringing with him a wall of air that nearly knocked Jack over.

"I can't find her!" he reported.

"What?"

"I can't find her!"

"I know what you said, but what do you mean? She's always around."

"No, seriously, I checked everywhere. I even," he leaned in and lowered his voice, "check the lady's bathroom."

"What?" Jack turned around, a bit stressed at Erika's missing state. "Hey, Ashley! You seen Erika anywhere recently?"

"I saw her yesterday morning," Ashley replied, twirling her hair around her finger and sitting down at one of the tables. "But I haven't seen her since."

"Hey, Zim! You seen Erika?"

"Do not bother me with matters of the hyperactive one!" Zim shot back. "I haven't had contact with the foul girl for near two days!"

Jack ran his hands over his head.

"Well… Run down to the basement anyway and see if they changed the combination yet…."

Pietro had already run off before Jack finished.

Jack removed his goggles from his head, cleaned them off with the hem of his shirt, and by the time he replaced his goggles, Pietro was back.

"They changed it! Do you think they suspect something?"

Jack threw his hands in the air and walked from the windows.

"Ugh! I don't know! They _can't_ know anything! If they suspected something they'd have us locked up in individual cells on different floors!"

He tapped the back of his head.

"Wait, go find Silence. He might know where Erika is."

"Yeah, but so much for getting an answer out of him," Pietro muttered before running off.

Though Pietro did find Silence, he couldn't get any sort of answer out of the stolid character. So, minutes became precious hours, and time ticked away without any further progress. Jack knew he could still handle his portion of the plan without his Helipack, but it wouldn't be easy.

Then, around 8:50 pm, over 30 hours since she'd last been seen, Erika returned to the common room.

"Where have yew been!" Dexter demanded, running up to her and just about shouting in her face.

Oddly enough, she didn't respond. She just sort of looked at him and shrugged, slowing moving away to sit by the window.

"Hey, where were you?" Ashley asked, also approaching.

"Speak up, woman," Stewie said, jumping up on the table.

Instead, Erika just dropped her head down on the table and let her arms hang at her side.

"Erika!" Ashley insisted. "_What_ is wrong? Where have you been? Did they do something to you?"

Slowly, Erika raised her head. Her dreadlocks were in total disarray, and she had shadows under her eyes that suggested she hadn't slept in days. She reached across the table and picked up a white, plastic spork someone had left behind.

"I can't," she whispered, gripping the cheap utensil to tightly that her hand shook. "I can't hear…_anything._ I can…hear you. But that's it. I can't…hear anything that you can't hear."

There was a shocked silence from the group for a long moment.

"You mean," Jack finally spoke up, "you can't use your powers…?"

Erika shook her head slowly, still gripping the spork like she wanted to squeeze blood from it.

"How is that possible?" Ashley asked slowly.

"I don't know," Erika said slowly. "But… I think I do know who is next."

As she spoke, Silence entered the room and looked around. He spotted Erika and crossed the room to remind her that she wasn't alone.

"Wait, do you think they took Silence's powers, too?" Pietro asked quickly.

"Of course zey did!" Dexter snapped. "And I bet zey did zee same ting to dat Russki fellow zer."

"But, why did Erika come back and Vlad leave?" Ashley asked.

"Shut up, Ashley!" Jack snapped. "Erika: _who_ do you think they're going to get next?"

Erika sort of tilted her head to the side and gave him a sad look.

"I think they suspect some sort of plot, and…I think they've picked out a leader. And, that's you, Jack."


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14

After Jack had gotten over the shock of Erika losing her powers, he busied himself with trying to figure out the new combination to the vault in the basement.

"Okay, here's what I got: It's either 867-5309 or 250624."

"Are you serious?" Pietro asked, arching one eyebrow.

"I'm dead serious," Jack replied. "I mean, c'mon! The last combo was 588-2300-EMPIRE!!"

"Four, three, twooo, one; shot out the barrel of a gun…" Ashley sang under her breath.

There was a brief silence as everyone gave Ashley a sideways glance.

"Zae put zum-sing in yeour food?" Dexter asked cynically.

"ANYWAY," Jack interrupted, here's the deal."

Jack's plan went as follows. They would use the remotes and other devise stolen back from the basement to activate as many of their robots as they could and free them by opening the huge hatch way over the court yard.

"Then," Jack went on, pointing to the map spread out over the table in their hidden room, "we'll set us up the bomb here."

"And all your base are belong to us," Erika muttered, still in a slightly depressed state about losing her powers.

"Exactly!" Jack said a little bit too loud. He dropped his voice back down again. "We can make our escape in the confusion, because, believe me, all the attention will be focused in on that explosion."

"Can we knock that one balding, whiney shrink off while we're at it?" Pietro asked.

"I don't see why not."

Erika was the first to sit up from her chair and get ready to leave.

"I guess I'll go with you guys…" she said slowly.

"Guess?!?" Jack and a few others repeated at once.

"What?" Stewey half laughed. "Were you at one time planning on not coming with? Because you know we could still use a distraction to run around in circles and scream after the blast."

Erika just didn't respond. She got out of her chair, walked over the sleeping GIR, stepped up on the chair by the wall and hoisted herself through the vent.

"Well somebody's depressed," Stewey commented, rolling his eyes.

"Yes… Zim agreed, speaking up for the first time in a while. "She acts more like the Silent one."

Everyone turned and looked at Zim in surprise, intrigued by this new concept.

It should be known that, after Erika made it back to her room via the vents, she wandered down the hall to find Silence. He was back by his window, staring endless towards a freedom he couldn't reach.

"I don't know," Erika said, standing next to him. "I guess I could leave when they do, but… then I'd have to, like, fend for myself and everything. I don't wanna live like a normal person… I don't see a reason to try to leave, really…"

Silence looked down at her and had a rare moment of desire to communicate. He held his hand out and made a first – his hands were easily twice the size of Erika's – and squeezed until his knuckles cracked. But, no one could actually hear the crack, of course.

"What is that supposed to mean?" Erika asked, just barely raising an eyebrow. "Crush them? Get angry? Eat peanuts?"

Silence gave a rare half smile and shook his head. He looked around and took a step back, signaling to Erika to follow him. He led her out of the Common area and back to his room. She followed him inside, where he reached underneath his bed and pulled out a large, black, folded up garment. From inside the material he pulled out an old, yellowed sheet of lined notebook paper. He handed it to Erika and signaled her to take it.

Erika left and stood in the hall way for a moment. Silence closed his door, so she didn't hear the click. Looking down at the paper, she turned it over and found a word written on the other side.

"Vengeance," she read aloud. "Vengeance? … Vengeance…" Slowly, a sinister smile spread across Erika's face. "Yeah…" she chuckled. "Vengeance!"

The next morning, the hours were counting to the big escape.

The team was standing in the line to get breakfast. Or lunch. Same thing.

Jack pushed some macaroni around in his plate to spell out the number 35. That was how many hours they had left.

"Any news on the combo?" Jack said out the corner of his mouth to Pietro.

"8675309," he replied in a slightly sing-song voice, imitating the original song.

"Figures," Jack sighed. "The hooker song."

Ashley sat down across from Jack and cracked open a can of something orange and carbonated.

"Uh, Jack," she began quietly. "Why are we waiting until tomorrow? Can't we just do it now?"

"We have to wait until tomorrow because tomorrow is Sunday and that's when half the prison staff take the day off," he explained quickly.

"Okay, but what about all the security guards. We can't really bust past them. They all have guns."

"Yeah, well, so do my robots, and his robots, and his robots," Jack said with a smirk, pointing in turn to Zim and Dexter. "And he moves faster than bullets, and he's a tiny target," Jack went on, motioning to Pietro then Stewey.

"And, so, I'm supposed to… do what?"

"Wear all black and be cat-like!" Jack laughed, panning his hands through the air. "You're good at that!"

Ashley hissed and swiped at him.

"Yeah, I'm never going to get used to the cat thing," Pietro said quickly.

Just then, a pair of guards came up behind Jack and one tapped him on the shoulder.

"Spicer," one said. "C'mon, get up. Time's up."

Jack stared straight ahead. One eye twitched a bit. He suddenly remembered that Erika said he 'was next'.

He looked to Zim, then Dex, then Pietro, and finally to Stewie.

"Boys," he said slowly. "I believe I shall be leaving _prematurely_," he gave them the cue. It was now or not at all.


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter 15 _(OMG it's almost OVER!!)_

The two guards lifted Jack clean out of his chair and dragged him across the Common room. Jack didn't even bother walking; he just hung there with is feet dragging and his arm crossed.

"Don't anybody try and help me, or anything like that, you know. I mean, I can totally handle these 250 pound guys myself. 'Cus, you know, I work out and everything."

All of Jack's associates were on their feet, not exactly sure how to respond or what to do. They didn't need to wonder for long, though, since there was someone else waiting for Jack when the guards pushed through the swinging double doors.

Jack craned his neck to see who was in the hall.

"Erika?" he asked. His neck cramped so he turned his head back to talk to her without even looking. "You look pissed. Drink a Red Bull or something?"

"Naw," Erika said slowly, taking a step towards the guards. "I actually got Bawlz."

Jack hadn't been paying much attention to the new names of new energy drinks of late, so he was a bit confused, to say the least.

"EXCUSE ME??" he exclaimed, squirming the guards' grasp.

Without warning or explaination, the guards released Jack and he dropped to the floor. He watched in total bewilderment as the two men's feet lifted right off the ground. A wave of black material passed over Jack's head and obscured his vision for a moment. When he looked up again, he saw a tall, dark figured dressed entirely in black, walking back into the Common Room with a guard in each hand by the neck.

"Holy Crudmuffins!" Jack cried out, jumping to his feet. "Who the hell is THAT?"

Erika, standing beside him now, folded her arms with a smile.

"Well, Jack, I think our quiet friends Silence got wind of your scheduled appointment today, and it seems he's bumping that escape plan all the way up to…right now."

The two guards writhed in Silence's grasp, but to little avail. Silence carried them, with the entire room staring in total disbelieve, over to the long windows over looking the courtyard as Erika began to speak, either to herself, the guards, or everyone at once.

"The time has come," she annunciated, "the Walrus said, to speak of many things! Of shoes and ship and ceiling wax, and whether pigs…"

In a single, powerful thrust, Silence sent both the guards smashing through the windows! Glass shattered all around and, for a split moment, it was inaudible. Then, with Silence's hands down, the guards screams and the glass shattering many stories below rang all the way up the circular design of the building.

"…have wings," Erika finished quietly. Neither she nor Silence showed even half an ounce of sympathy for the murder. Everyone else, on the other hand, had something to say.

"DO THAT AGAIN!" someone from the back of the Common room shouted out enthusiastically.

"That was like, Darth Vader Dark Lord Sith Power TIMES TEN!!" someone else screamed, jumping up onto a table.

Jack threw his hands up and stepped on to a chair.

"Everyone!" he screamed, getting the attention of most. There were a few moments of quiet as a distant security alarm sounded on other floors. If Jack's mental state had been that of a Hollywood writer, he would have given a short but moving speech about freedom and human rights. But, because he was Jack Spicer, Evil Boy Genius, he said the only thing that really made sense.

**"HOLY HELL!! WE'RE BUSTIN' OUT OF HERE!!!!"**

The whole room, at least two hundred inmates, erupted into a wild, frenzied roar. Just as more guards came dashing to the scene, men and women were running everywhere and quite a few were already on their way out. Out the doors, out the windows; OUT.

Silence turned sharply on some guards and threw his hands back to open his cloak. He his palms together low, near his belt. Sharply, with invisible speed, he thrust his hands open and forward, as though releasing an extremely hot potato.

For a moment, Jack thought he'd gone deaf. All the clamor and screams and breaking glass fell totally silent. He watched the surreal scene of the half-dozen guards being sent soaring back into a wall with such force that the cement crumbled. There was blood- the guards obviously died on impact- and then, just as sharply as it had fallen silent, the din erupted again.

"What in the heck?" Jack looked to Erika.

"Pretty cool, huh? Silence has been keeping his powers secret for YEARS, just waiting for the perfect chance to escape."

"If he can do THAT," Jack said as Ashley came running over, "then this must be a hell of a lot more difficult to break out of than we thought!"

Silence held his hand up and pointed to the floor, and then to Pietro.

"The basement!" Jack shouted. "C'mon, let's go get our robots!"

"Where are Zim and Dexter?" Ashley asked, looking around frantically.

"Who cares?" Jack laughed as he, Erika, and Silence ran for the elevator. He pulled four complex and diverse remotes from his jacket. "You think I'd trust them to stick to the plan? Psssh!! Keep up!"

"It's jammed!" Erika shouted when they reached the elevator. "The security system must have automatically locked it down!"

"You're damn right it did!" a new voice jumped in.

Everyone spun around sharply, aside from Silence, to see Jack's psychiatrist, Ms. Patience, standing behind them in her pin-stripe suit with walking stick in hand.

"Don't even try to stop us!" Erika warned. "Silence'll hand you skinny white ass to you!"

"I'm not trying to stop you," Patience said, much to everyone's surprise. She pushed through them and flipped open a hidden panel above the elevator controls. "There's not a single system in the complex that can't be over-ridden," she explained quickly, "with _this._" She held up a flat-topped, golden ring with a strange design on it's face.

"Hey, you get that off that Goldstein jerk?" Jack asked quickly.

Patience chuckled under her breath as she pushed the face of the ring into a small scanner. In about two seconds, the doors slid smoothly open with a 'ding'.

"Here," she handed the ring to Silence. "I'm leaving this with the adult supervisor of the group." Before she ran to make for another part of the facility, she turned to Jack.

"Hey, try not to completely destroy the place while I'm still in it, alright? Gimme at least ten minutes."

"Oh, yes Sir!" Jack replied quickly. "Ma'am. DOCTOR!!"

The elevator door closed between them and they began their descent for the basement. Silence held his hands to the door and the tell-tale hum of their presence in the lift was erased.

"Well," Ashley said in a perky tone. "That was nice of her."

"Maybe," Erika replied. "How did she get Goldstein's ring off his hand?"

"And why DID she show me how to disable the security cameras?" Jack added on.

Silence held up his hand and pulled that faded piece of lined paper from the gauntlet of his glove. He handed it to Jack this time.

"Vengeance," Jack read aloud. "… I see."

The elevator reached the basement.


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Once more, the group made their way quickly down the white, ever-turning hallway that outlined the courtyard from below. When they reached the door with the access panel, Jack immediately ran through as many cliché numbers as he could think of.

"C'mon!" he shouted, tensing his hands over the panel as though he was about to rip it apart. None of this numbers were accepted. "Silence! Where's that ring from Patience?"

Without needing to be told, Silence brought out the ring and pushed its flat head into a round icon on the panel's screen. The results were instantaneous, and the door to the storeroom _wooshed_ open.

The group rushed into the dark clutter of faintly reflecting machines and exposed circuit boards.

Hysterika and Ashley had never been into the court yard basement, and the endless collection of master-mind creations was startling. Towering robots and 'Alien' type exoskeletons with stainless steel eyes, titanium claws, and countless hidden weapons were cramped under the low ceiling. It was as though they'd all just been dumped in from above with the ceiling then shut tight.

"It's like a Transformers graveyard," Erika muttered, looking into the eyes of a robot collapsed on its side.

"Yeah, well, then get ready for some serious zombie robot action," Jack replied loudly, holding several remotes in the crook of both arms as he tried to locate and activate usable bots.

"You'd never know all hell was breaking loose in the building," Ashley commented, looking upwards to listen for a commotion from above.

"Well, three feet on concrete is good for that…" Jack muttered, trying to figure out the bizarre, alien-like symbols on Zim's remote. "What the hell…? Okay, wait…I think I got something here…"

"You don't know how to use the other guy's remotes?" Pietro asked sharply.

"I didn't design them!" Jack shot back immediately. "This one isn't even in English! And Dexter's is in _French!_ What the hell is "_La Vache_", anyway? Ah, whatever."

Then, Jack had an idea.

"Uh, girls…Could you hold these for a moment?"

Erika and Ashley looked at each other, puzzled, and then walked over to Jack.

"Us? Really?" Ashley asked.

"Yes, really," Jack said with a fake grin. "Just don't push any buttons, okay?" he warned sarcastically.

"Seriously?" Erika laughed. She grabbed Zim's purple remote and immediately began pushing whichever button struck her fancy. Ashley took Dexter's silver remote and toyed around with it a little more cautiously.

"Here, Speedy," Jack said, handing Stewie's red remote to Pietro. "See if you can find some of the armored guns."

"Speedy? Who do I look like? The Alka-Seltzer Boy?"

"Just- just _go_ and find things to blow stuff up with!"

Pietro rolled his eyes and zipped away, dashing from point to point among the sleeping machines.

In the meantime, Jack took his own remote and quickly sought out some of his JackBots.

"Hey, an Outlaw Bot!" he exclaimed happily, pulling the bot into a sitting position by the shoulders. He flipped the power switch in the back of its head and the robot's eyes filled with the red light of life.

"Howdy, Sir," the JackBot said in the flat, monotone voice of most Jack's creations.

"Ambre," Jack ordered, "go find as many members of the Evil Posse as you can and activate them!"

"Yes, Sir. Right away Sir," the six and a half foot tall Outlaw Bot responded, getting to its feet and straightening its hat.

"Sick," Jack cackled with an evil smirk as the bot tromped away. "I always liked those bots."

Just as Jack set off to look for more of his old robots, he heard a strange humming noise in the distance. At first, he hoped that one of the others had managed to awaken a robot, but Erika's wild laughing made him think otherwise. A white light lit up in the distance, casting creepy shadows formed by the many sharp angles of the robots. Within seconds, the light began to move, and soon it rounded the nearest machine, which Jack suddenly noticed to be a type of tank.

"Jack!" Erika shouted. "LOOK at THIS thing!"

Erika was sitting atop a strange hovercraft that wasn't too unlike a sort of bike. It has three main, round sections to it, all colored a light, reddish purple color with pieces of silver and black. It emitted a white and purple light and easily hovered about a foot above the ground. Suddenly, Jack recognized it.

"Hey, I've seen that before!" He jumped back from it for a moment, trying to make some sense of the machine. "I don't know WHO ELSE they've got locked up here, but that's a Covenant Ghost!"

"A what?"

"You know, like the vehicle you can drive in Halo?"

"… Halo?"

"The video game? Halo? Master Chief? Covenant? Only reason anyone owns an X-Box?"

Erika only continued to stare.

Jack held his hands up and shook his head.

"Ah! Okay, never mind! You've been here too long! Forget about it! Just… I don't know, just don't break it. That could come in handy."

"Can do!" Erika cried out, turning the Ghost and speeding away in another direction.


	17. Chapter 17

_First off, I'd just like to say Sorry for dragging this story out for ever and ever. I've had a couple other large art projects to work on, namely an energy-consuming Star Wars comic. Also, the usual: work, school (in one form or another) and, naturally, writer's block. Don't you just hate it when you know what you want to happen in a story, but you just can't write it down, and by the time you finally get around to it you've either lost interest or altered the narrative beyond recognition? Welcome to my life._

_In the midst of all the world's fan fictions and wild original plot line or alternate universes, it's easy to forget who Jack Spicer is. He is sometimes portrayed as an excessive whiner and moma's boy. Sometimes, he's an openly homosexual fanboy. Sometimes, he's a brilliant evil genius bent on nothing but total world domination. In the chaos of it all, it's easy to forget the real Jack Spicer, the original Jack._

_I'm talking about the Saturday morning Jack. Specifically, First Season Jack. When I, personally, think of Jack, I think of the Jack we knew in the first season of XS. Yes, he was immature, but he was only partly the show's comic relief. He was a wise-cracking robotics tech and a temperamental artiste. Honestly, I can't remember him ever doing anything to earn him the title of 'moma's boy'- it was just a dis someone threw at him one day. And there was certainly nothing even remotely gay about him- even after seasons 2 and 3, I still can't see it._

_Now, whether I've been faithful to First Season Jack in this fan-fiction or whether I've created a new variation of Jack is up to debate. Nonetheless, I've had my fun borrowing Jack Spicer from his creators (as we all have) and now I'm afraid it's time to bring StraightJacket to a close, at long last. So, here it is: Chapter 17. (Just so you know, I wrote the entire thing in a single, late-night go, so PLEASE excuse the many typos I undoubtedly missed!)_

* * *

**Part One**

In the time that Jack and his cohorts had been under Building 0, the alarms reigning over the facilities had fallen silent.

"What's going on?" Erika asked quietly, looking up to the black ceiling.

"They canceled the alarms…" Jack said slowly. "But, that would mean…"

Jack didn't need to say that it meant his little revolution had been quelled and order regained throughout.

"They'll be hunting for you, you know," Ashley reminded him, raising one eyebrow.

"No duh!" Jack snapped. "And you, too! Forget that?"

"Do you think they found Silence?" Pietro asked after a short pause.

Jack just shrugged.

"Even if they did, I think we can trust him not to talk." Jack glanced down at his watch and thought for a moment. "Okay, it's almost noon now. This is probably the last place they'll think to look, and even if they do come down this way, there are plenty of places to hide. I say, we take a few hours to get everything ready and then make a break for it as soon as the sun goes down."

Erika gave Jack a strange look.

"You know, _Jack_," she stressed, putting her hands on her hips, "robot preparation really isn't our thing. That was more Dexter and Zim's…"

Jack cut her off before she could finish.

"Yes, yes, I know! But they aren't here and there's no way to get them here! And I can't stand those guys, anyway. They're so full of themselves!"

Ashley and Erika exchanged a fast, purse-lipped glance.

Jack released an aggravated sigh and ran his hands through his hair, pushing his head back as he did so.

"Okay, I've got the rest of the afternoon. I'm gonna start with all the Jackbots, since they rely on voice commands and are the easiest to control. If I can get some of the other tech running and operational, great, but for now, let stick to Bots."

He was well aware of the overwhelming predictability of his plan. With the break-out quelled, Jack would not only be without a distraction, but all security factions would be on the lookout for any sign of him. The so-called 'cover of darkness' was the most predictable and most common time for an escape attempt, so you'd have to be an absolute fool or a striking genius to use it.

Jack was beginning to feel like a little bit of both.

Just then, as Jack thought about the waning time before sunset and the undoubted influx of security that would take place that night, he came upon an interesting idea.

"The Common Hall," he thought aloud, "had that one blind spot, right in the middle of everything. There must be…"

Jack put down what he was doing and let his JackBot sag forward, barely standing on its own. He closed his eyes in an attempt to visualize the exact architecture he had seen so many times before from the broad Common Room windows. He buried his hands in his hair and noticed for the first time that, as the night grew cold, the non-insolated conditions of the hanger allowed the visibility of his breath. Then, finally, he figured it out.

"Yeah, I'm a genius," Jack laughed quietly, breaking from his trance-like state and returning to work on his Bot moments before it keeled over. As he went back to work on his robots, his inspiration renewed, he couldn't help but laugh a bit to himself.

The facilities of the Moore Bideath Asylum spanned over several acres, consisting of almost entirely grey, right-angled buildings. Every building had, literally, a set of ramparts on top, wrapping around the four edges of each roof, complimented with either a spotlight or turret platform at each corner. In the center of the compound was Building 0, where Jack's entire ordeal had unfolded. Building 0 was a perfect ring, down to the acutely curved rooms, windows, and doors. And from his office, Dr. Schneider could oversee every foot of the grounds. At least, he thought he could.

"Dr. Schneider," said Dr. Patience as she let himself into his office. "It seems that the head of security still can't locate the cause of the alarm failure. We're still working on rounding up, well, the majority of the inma- patients, and still no sign of… Erika, Ashley, Pietro, Silence, or…. Spicer," she reported, reading off a clip board.

"Why can't the guards take control?" Dr. Schneider demanded, folding his arms crossly.

"Well, these are _villains_ we're talking about," Patience replied behind his back, arching one eyebrow knowingly. "And they haven't had a good fight in a looong time. A lot of them…" she slowed her speech, carefully choosing her words, "have a lot of pent up anger… they've seized the chance for revenge, to relive some long held grudge…" she carefully pronounced the last three words, gripping her walking stick tightly around its middle.

The sun was shining on the other side of the earth and the night was cold, the sky obscured by a haze of polluted clouds. No one noticed, in the darkness, the heart mirage that had developed over the court yard in the center of Building 0. From his stow away base of operations, Jack was bringing life to a robot graveyard.

Around 8 p.m., Jack made the announcement to the others that they should all find a place to curl up and get some rest, because he had postponed the escape until sun_rise_.

By sheer luck, Jack found one of his many iPhones hidden away inside an old Junk Bot. It was while searching around for some good tunes that he stumbled upon what was easily one of the nerdiest yet brilliant websites he'd ever seen: How To Build Your Own Transformer-With-Theme-Music-Off-the-Radio.

Now, Jack had no intention of building a regular old transformer. Besides, he moved far beyond simple transformations with the development of the ChameleonBot years ago. What really caught his interest was the Power Ranger-inspired section of the web page that detailed how to design and program normal self-operating machines to synchronize and operate as a single unit.

"Jackbots: unite!" he laughed to himself as he worked feverishly into the night. An operational bot beside him ran through the iPhone, searching for the local weather.

"I don't know," Jack retorted to the bots inquiry. "I don't know where this place is! Just use the GPS."

"We are looking at possible showers and a 19 chance of thunder storms around midnight," the Jackbot recited in its digitized voice.

"Hmm. I'm assuming these things'll hold up against a bit of water…yeah… Okay, search me out some good tunes. I want some sort of, like, Led Zepplin Rob Zombie techno remix!"

"Yes, sir," the Jackbot saluted and promptly began poking away at the screen in its search.

The hours wore on and Jack eventually resorted to sending Pietro on a dare-devil run to find some energy drinks.

"See if those doctors have any sort of performance enhancers while you're at it…" Jack suggested, half serious, before Pietro made his break for it.

Once Pietro was gone, likely to return in a minute or two, Jack prepared to work on his central machine, but he refused to start making the real adjustments until he had something extremely caffeinated in his system.

"Jack!" Pietro exclaimed upon his sudden return.

"Woah! What?" Jack snapped, taking one of the energy drinks.

"It's insanity up there! And I don't mean the regular kind of insanity that's always been up there, I mean, like, people are still running around and going nuts and fighting back! I think the time to bust out is NOW. They're still looking for us, and no one can figure out how to reactive the alarm system! Without that thing, they can't recruit for help from nearby law enforcement! Also, it's raining like mad out there and a lot of the people who've been locked up for a long time are having relapses into their evil ways and I'm telling you it is _out_ of control! I didn't see anybody we know, though."

Jack stared for a moment, looking at Pietro past the body of the upturned can he was in the process of chugging dry. He dropped the empty can sharply and took another with a gasp. Just as he popped the second one open, he managed to slip in, between breaths, a quick,

"Holy crud muffins, Pietro, you really did some recon out there." He threw back the second can and emptied it at an alarming rate. "Good job," he finished, dropping the second can and reaching for a third. This one he went easy one, meaning to take it in gradually as he worked.

"Hey, Freak Girls!" Jack yelled across the basement to Ashley and Erika. "Come share one a these things! Y'all ready to take out some serious revenge? Just gimmie, like, 20 minutes on this bot. It looks like it's got some sort of alien AI in it… Maybe half an hour."

**Part Two**

Silence stood in the shadows of the deep control room, drawing his hand back from a console. It was a seemingly insignificant system, one that a technician might consider inconsequential to the remainder of the alarm system, but the entire security network would fail without it. Interestingly, Silence was not using his powers this time around. He had simply worked with the common knowledge that the asylum's technicians always overlooked the most basic explanations and tried to go straight into the mainframe of the facility computers. All Silence did was hold back a wire leading to the audio controls- essentially, he was push the mute button.

He'd been at Moore Asylum long enough to know that when a system did not work here, it was usually because someone had simply forgotten to plus something in.

Common oversights were actually something of a theme throughout Moore.

As Silence made his way back from the security central, snaking along as only a silent shadow can, he made outdoors an into the eternally spot-light scanned grounds. A series of accidental alleyways, however, brought him down a route on which no light had ever fallen, all the way to the main offices.

Now, incase it was not already apparent, Silence was an extraordinary man. He had an exceptional sense of balance, a feature that made his day after day stands in the common room possible. So, using the relieved architecture on the face of the office building, he was able to swiftly scale the building to the top floor; the floor that contained the offices of all the most important doctors.

Dr. Schneider could not have been more surprised. To see Silence step down through the tall window, out from the rain and black night illuminated solely by searchlights, sent a cold shiver through his whole system.

"Silence!" He exclaimed, jumping up and backing toward the door. Silence only met him with that same blank, dark expression he always wore. Just before Dr. Schneider made it to the door, Patience came through the door from the hall way.

"Prefect timing! Patience, call security…." Schneider was not quite able to finish his sentence when he saw the look on Seek's face.

"Yes, perfect timing indeed!" she replied, slamming the door behind her and hefting her cane up into her hands.

"What?! What is this?" Dr. Schneider demanded, trying to back away from both Patience and Silence at the same time.

"I'll tell you exactly what it is," Patience sneered, "but only because _he_ cannot," she cocked her head towards Silence. "This is about vengeance. This is about taking back a voice. And this is about repaying all the damage you've done in this world. You cannot 'construct' a villain, Dr. Schneider, nor can you ever attempt to quell the spirit of one. Evils are not defeated- they are only delayed, detoured. When I heard, all those years ago, that you were actually _collecting_ the world's masterminds under the guise of an insane asylum all for the petty cause of developing something greater, I simply couldn't let you get away with it. So I've put up with you and your ridiculous plans, none of which, I might add, have ever really achieved their evil potential, waiting for this one moment! I knew you would eventually reach your quota in this place, and with so much brilliance concentrated into one place, an opportunity such as this was bound to present itself!"

At this, Silence took one strong lunge forward and grabbed the unfortunate 'doctor' and lifted him clear off the floor by the collar.

"I think what Silence is trying to tell you," Patience smirked, "is that you've failed to see things from _our_ perspective. That's why you couldn't work out any sort of 'evil formula'. You can't think like us- you've only managed to become a total jerk. And, in the mean time, we've worked out all the chinks in the armor that you couldn't see, that you refused to see."

Dr. Schneider tried to protest, but his being had fallen completely silent.

"Can you see the waves of heat rising from the core of Building 0?" Seek asked as Silence walked towards the window with Schneider. "Of course you can't."

Patience took a moment to stare at her hated foe, under whom she'd worked so many years, waiting so patiently for this chance to upturn the whole operation.

"You know," she said sharply, in a whole new tone, "I almost took you for being smarter than this. At the very least, after all your research into the villainous mind, you should have realized that, one, someone was operating from within your system; two, that we, the villainy of the world, would never let you get away with this; and three, that it would end like this, coming full circle."

Dr. Schneider finally met eyes with Silence, but only for a moment. He could see the searing loathing in Silence's eyes, and he tried to plea for some kind of mercy, bargain for some arrangement, or even ask forgiveness, but he could make no sound. After a moment of this, Silence suddenly did something unexpected. He drew Schneider just close enough as so there would be no mistake.

Very carefully, Silence smoothly mouthed out the words, "Too late."

Even though he made no sound, the impact was as deep as though Silence had spoken.

It was well past midnight. The sleeping machines were awake, the largest one still lying in their original resting place, unable to shift until the bunker doors were opened. Jack was ecstatic, brimming with artificial energy and invigorated by the full-spectrum lights from many of the robots. Erika and Ashley were equally exhilarated, caught up in the rush of the prospect of such a daring escape.

But, they knew it was more than just an escape. If Jack had intended to simply escape, he would have left the heavy artillery inactivated. No one had ever said it aloud, but there seemed to be a common knowledge among all who had worked on this project, from the very beginning, that escape was only a piece of the plan. No, there was much more on Jack's mind than escape.

"Y'all ready for this?" Jack called out in sync with the remix of the same song playing from a system in his main robot. "Jackbots: Activate!"

All at once, every single machine that Jack had been able to get his hands on came to life. As they got to their feet or warmed up their engines, Jack pulled his goggles down over his eyes.

"Okay, it's 120 yards to the outer perimeter, we got a full tank of gas, half a six pack of Red Bull, its dark out and I'm wearing goggles!"

"HIT IT!"

It wouldn't be enough to say that the guards were caught by surprise. It wouldn't be enough to say that Jack Spicer single handedly managed to produce an obscuring wave of steam that swept out over the entire asylum as the cold rain buffeted the heated machines. And it wouldn't be enough for Jack to leave with out doing everything he always wanted to do.

His central command body was a huge droid with arms and legs but no 'head' portion, just a reinforced midsection. The machine was a basic design, but it was also the most heavily armored of the bots that went into the fight that night. Jack bots of all shapes, sizes, and versions either swarmed into the air or hitched a ride up from the open hanger doors of the basement under Building 0. Ships of strange, alien design rose up, as if from the dead, some still shedding cobwebs that dissolved in the hard rain. All spotlights turned towards the uprising of technology, and, for a moment, the only sound was that of the roar of the rain.

Then, gradually at first, a second sound joined in with the steady hum of the rain.

A guard on the ramparts barely turned to his cohort and asked aloud,

"Is that Aqua?"

"Sounds more like Rob Zombie…"

What ever it was, the momentary truce shattered like the glass of Dr. Schneider's window. Jack's robots unleashed their tempers and tore into the spot lights, turrets, and land vehicles with a vengeance. One by one, the spot lights were extinguished, until the only light came from the thousands of tiny yellow windows in the buildings or the unnatural glow of the machines.

It was entirely by coincidence that the moment Dr. Schneider hit the ground below his fifth story office that the first wall in the exterior of Building 0 collapsed.

It goes without saying that there was not much of a battle. The battle had been fought in the weeks, months, and years before, quietly, between the captives and their captors. This night was simply deciding turn in the war, the point at which all knew who had won and who had lost.

The outer wall of Moore Asylum crumbled as Jack walked his central bot straight through it. He even made a point of kicking aside some rubble to clear a clean escape path. Other portions of the wall began to fall, as well, but not by Jack's command. Using a reconnaissance bot, Jack discovered that his partners in crime, Dexter, Zim, Stewey, and others had reclaimed some of their own technology and put it to its full potential.

One can probably imagine the scene without much narration. The masses flooded from the prison, finally released back into the world, for better or for worse. Machine guns crippled mainframes of buildings, electrical fires raged despite the torrents of rain, and the occasional laser beam lit up the night to reduce a cement wall to dust. And over it all played a mildly familiar remix of something catchy.

At this point, Jack Spicer was at the top of his game.

"Burn, baby! Muahahahaha!" He laughed manically. The half dozen energy drinks had really gotten to his system. Erika was whipping around on what Jack knew had to be a Halo Banshee, and he spotted a few other enacting some personal vengeance.

Just then, Jack noticed a distance sound, one that linked to none of the madness he'd caused. Positioned just outside the asylum, he scanned the area from his new vantage point. He had forgotten, up until that night when he was working on his bots, that the asylum over looked an ocean or sea. It over looked from a vantage point on a cliff.

This was the source of Jack's 'renewed inspiration', but it didn't look like he'd have to do much work to fulfill his plan.

"Give my regards to Nemo, Moore Bideath," Jack said darkly, watching as the edges of the cliff began to crumble. Just to help things along, he launched a guided missile from his bot's left arm to wrap around the coast and impact against the cliff face.

By that point, any one who was going to make it out of the buildings was out. Beginning with only a few rocks, then quickly developing into a wave of boulder and earth, the once-stable foundation of the asylum tumbled into the sea. Jack opened the cockpit of his ride to listen to the chaos of acres upon acres of laboratory, office, and asylum collapse into the sea.

However, there was no sound. There was no snapping or grinding, no screeching metal frames or shorting electrical systems. No, all was silent. As it turn out, the cliff side was much to stable to have ever collapsed after such a minor disruption. It would take a deep-rooted geological tremor to trigger the caving. Luckily, that was exactly the frequency Silence was able to produce on a large scale. It was silent to the human ear, but the waves were still there, and they still shook the earth into submission.

**Prologue**

Months later, when Jack Spicer would recall his unpleasant time at the asylum, he didn't actually have much to say about it all.

"I was sort of disappointed about Silence. I mean, come on, man. That's like muting the best part of the movie! Still," he would add, "I guess he was making a point. I guess that place took his voice, so maybe it was only fare that he take away its, you know, its last cry. I don't know. I never really got Silence."

As for the people Jack met while there, they all more or less stuck out on their own. The sudden influx in villains in the world led a rise in emergent heroes, so the news was suddenly much more entertaining. Le Mime went back to Paris to practice his same old mischief. Stewey had a family that apparently brought him home against his will, Dexter was glad to return to his lab, and Zim went back to his distant town to settle some unfinished business with his next door neighbor. Vlad, apparently, had been released from the asylum upon the decision that he was not actually an evil villain (your guess is as good as mine) and given a free ticket in exchange for keeping his mouth shut about Moore and Dr. Schneider. Ashley returned to her life style of mall crawling, and Erika ended up joining some band in their bus/tour of the country. Dr. Patience went home to begin work forging a new certificate of degree, this time to become a dentist. And Silence… well, that's a tough call. In classic Silence mannerism, he fell out of contact with the others and now no one really knows where he went. But, we're all pretty sure he's around.

And Jack? Jack Spicer went back to his plans for world domination.

"I've got fresh ideas, you know!" he bragged to the ghostly Wuya upon his return.

"Oh please," Wuya muttered.

"Hey, I'm serious! I was in with a lot of brilliant minds! Not nearly as brilliant as myself, of course, but they did offer a fresh perspective. Perspective is very important, Wuya," he said sagely, rolling under his hotrod to make some adjustments. "You wouldn't want to leave any blind spots!"

"Right," Wuya snapped. Suddenly, she twitched and spun in place once. "That in mind, I'm going to get a new perspective of a Shen Gong Wu that just revealed itself! Quick, Jack! We must get to it first!"

"One second, ghost lady," Jack said, rolling out from under his car. He picked up a transformer action figure he had lying on the work table and popped it onto the car antenna. "There! Perfect! Now, which way to that Shen Gong Wu?"


End file.
